Altered emotional prosody processing in patients with Parkinson’s disease after subthalamic nucleus stimulation

Abstract

BackgroundPatients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) exhibit deficits in recognizing and expressing vocal emotional prosody. The aim of this study was to explore emotional prosody processing in patients with PD shortly after subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS).MethodsTwo groups of patients with PD (pre-DBS and post-DBS) and one healthy control (HC) group were recruited as participants. All participants (PD and HC) were assessed using the Montreal Affective Voices database 50 Voices Recognition test. All participants were asked to nonverbally express five basic emotions (happiness, anger, fear, sadness, and neutral) to test emotional prosody expression. Fifteen native Chinese speakers were recruited as raters. We recorded the accuracy rate, reaction time, confidence level, and two acoustic parameters (mean pitch and mean intensity).ResultsThe PD groups scored lower than the HC group in recognizing and expressing emotional prosody. STN DBS had no significant effect on the recognition of emotional prosody but had a significant effect on fear prosody expression. Pearson’s correlation analysis revealed significant correlations between performance on emotional prosody recognition tests and performance on emotional prosody expression tests in both the pre-DBS PD and post-DBS PD groups.ConclusionShortly after STN DBS, the ability to recognize emotional prosody was not altered, but fear expression was impaired. We identified associations between abnormalities in emotional prosody recognition and expression deficits both before and after STN DBS, indicating that the processes involved in recognizing and expressing emotional prosody may share a common system.

Motor symptom asymmetry in Parkinson's disease predicts emotional outcome following subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation

“…We observed an effect of DBS on emotional prosody recognition at the subgroup level, and we can assume that studies suggesting that there is no post-DBS effect are those that fail to take motor lateralization at disease onset into account, thereby inducing a noneffect. For instance, a recent study concluded that after STN DBS, the ability to recognize emotional prosody remains intact, and only fear production is impaired (Jin et al, 2017). It is interesting to note that its results at the whole group level were almost the same as ours (compare Supplementary Material Fig.…”

“…SI 2 in this article with Fig. 1b in Jin et al, 2017). Had these authors analyzed their data separately according to motor lateralization, we can speculate that the patterns of results would have been different.…”

Social perceptual function in parkinson’s disease: A meta-analysis

“…The fourth aim was to provide the first meta-analytic assessment of whether DBS is linked to greater social perceptual impairment. DBS is an established alternative option for reducing motor symptoms for PwPD who fail to respond to, or are not suitable for, dopaminergic treatment (Biseul et al, 2005;Dujardin et al, 2004b;Jin et al, 2017). The subthalamic nucleus can be functionally divided into sensorimotor (dorsolateral), limbic (medial) and cognitive (ventromedial) regions.…”

Evidence for a vocal signature in the rat and its reinforcing effects: a key role for the subthalamic nucleus

“…Importantly, STN-DBS also affects vocal expression by improving the oral motor control of PD patients' speech [60]. Although in parallel, it could negatively impact their expression and decoding of emotions [61,62]. These effects would depend on the exact location of the electrode's implantation in the STN (e.g.…”