Decoding emotional prosody in Parkinson's disease and its potential neuropsychological basis

Abstract

Parkinson's disease patients may have difficulty decoding prosodic emotion cues. These data suggest that the basal ganglia are involved, but may reflect dorsolateral prefrontal cortex dysfunction. An auditory emotional n-back task and cognitive n-back task were administered to 33 patients and 33 older adult controls, as were an auditory emotional Stroop task and cognitive Stroop task. No deficit was observed on the emotion decoding tasks; this did not alter with increased frontal lobe load. However, on the cognitive tasks, patients performed worse than older adult controls, suggesting that cognitive deficits may be more prominent. The impact of frontal lobe dysfunction on prosodic emotion cue decoding may only become apparent once frontal lobe pathology rises above a threshold.

Not all sounds sound the same: Parkinson's disease affects differently emotion processing in music and in speech prosody

“…Accordingly, other studies have also found that in PD executive function correlates with the recognition of emotional prosody (e.g., Breitenstein, Lancker, Daum, & Waters, 2001;Pell & Leonard, 2003). Furthermore, it has been suggested that some subgroups of patients show normal processing of prosody because the impairment is detected only when the executive and working memory impairments are prominent (Benke et al, 1998;Caekebeke et al, 1991;Garrido-Vásquez et al, 2012;Mitchell & Bouças, 2009). It might be Dissociating emotions in music and speech in PD 27 that basal ganglia pathways are chiefly involved in later stages of emotion recognition in prosody, where executive processes are preponderant.…”

“…Some prior studies found more pronounced defects (e.g., Dara et al, 2008;Gray & Tickle-Degnen, 2010;Paulmann & Pell, 2010;Pell & Leonard, 2003;Yip et al, 2003), but others found no defects at all (Caekebeke, JennekensSchinkel, Linden, Buruma, & Roos, 1991;Garrido-Vásquez et al, 2012;Kan, Kawamura, Hasegawa, Mochizuki, & Nakamura, 2002;Mitchell & Bouças, 2009). Therefore, our study adds to the point that the severity of prosodic impairments is highly variable across PD samples (Gray & Tickle-Degnen, 2010).…”

“…Apart from the well-known motor syndrome, these pathological changes affect diverse cognitive and emotional functions because basal ganglia are richly interconnected with the rest of the brain: they receive broad cortical inputs and project back Dissociating emotions in music and speech in PD 6 to the cortex via the thalamus, thereby modulating activity in a variety of cortical regions (e.g., Nambu, 2008;Utter & Basso, 2008). Some neuropsychological studies indicate that PD patients recognize emotions in speech prosody less accurately than healthy controls, i.e., patients may be less able to identify emotions as communicated by the tone of voice (e.g., Pell & Leonard, 2003;Péron et al, 2012;Yip, Lee, Ho, Tsang, & Li, 2003; but see GarridoVásquez et al, 2012;Mitchell & Bouças, 2009). In a meta-analytic review of 28 comparisons, Gray and Tickle-Dengnen (2010) concluded that the size of this effect is very heterogeneous across samples, though it has been observed with different emotion recognition tasks, such as forced-choice and rating tasks.…”

“…One hypothesis is that basal ganglia dysfunction in PD might impair, at an intermediate stage of processing, the meaningful perceptual sequencing of dynamic, timedependent information; the striatum would act as a binding mechanism for the emotionally significant acoustic parameters that unfold in the speech stream, paving the way for further cortical emotion recognition processes (Kotz & Schwartze, 2010;Meyer, Steinhauer, Alter, Dissociating emotions in music and speech in PD 7 Friederici, & Cramon, 2004;Paulmann & Pell, 2010;Pell & Leonard, 2003). Alternatively, the basal ganglia might be primarily involved in later stages of processing, mediating executive processes required for higher-order operations in emotion recognition tasks, such as decision-making and labeling (Benke, Bösch, & Andree, 1998;Paulmann, Ott, & Kotz, 2011;Mitchell & Bouças, 2009). According to the meta-analysis by Gray and Tickle-Degnen (2010), prosodic difficulties in PD might be related with the patients' executive and working memory impairments.…”

What rhythmic perception and amusia can tell us about vocal social communication in schizophrenia

“…pitch) abilities contribute to prosodic processing more generally, it also offers a more general proof-of-concept for a new approach to the cognitive neuroscience of neuropsychiatric illnesses.Illnesses like schizophrenia are increasingly appreciated as being heterogeneous innature,and abnormal behavior such as prosody perception may be impaired in some individuals, but not in others. Additionally, many of the socio-cognitive markers such as impaired prosody perception that present in schizophrenia are not specific to the illness, and alsopresent in other disorders such as autism, Alzheimer"s disease, bipolar disorder, and Parkinson"s disease (42)(43)(44)(45)(46). From a neuroscience perspective, the ability to perceive social intent through prosody is a highly complex event involvingmany cortical and subcortical brain regions (47)(48)(49)(50).…”