Impaired emotion perception and categorization in semantic aphasia

Abstract

According to a constructionist model of emotion, conceptual knowledge plays a foundational role in emotion perception; reduced availability of relevant conceptual knowledge should therefore impair emotion perception. Conceptual deficits can follow both degradation of semantic knowledge (e.g., semantic 'storage' deficits in semantic dementia) and deregulation of retrieval (e.g., semantic 'access' deficits in semantic aphasia). While emotion recognition deficits are known to accompany degraded conceptual knowledge, less is known about the impact of semantic access deficits. Here, we examined emotion perception and categorization tasks in patients with semantic aphasia, who have difficulty accessing semantic information in a flexible and controlled fashion following left hemisphere stroke. In Study 1, participants were asked to sort faces according to the emotion they portrayedwith numbers, written labels and picture examples each provided as category anchors across tasks.Semantic aphasia patients made more errors and showed a larger benefit from word anchors that reduced the need to internally constrain categorization than comparison participants.They successfully sorted portrayals that differed in valence (positive vs. negative) but had difficulty categorizing different negative emotions. They were unimpaired on a control task that involved sorting faces by identity. In Study 2, participants matched facial emotion portrayals to written labels following vocal emotion prosody cues, miscues, or no cues.Patients presented with overall poorer performance and benefited from cue trials relative to within-valence miscue trials. This same effect was seen in comparison participants, who also showed deleterious effects of within-valence miscue relative to no cue trials. Overall, we found that patients with deregulated semantic retrieval have deficits in emotional perception but that word anchors and cue conditions can facilitate emotion perception by increasing access to relevant emotion concepts and reducing reliance on semantic control. Semantic control may be of particular importance in emotion perception when it is necessary to interpret ambiguous inputs, or when there is interference between conceptually similar emotional states. These findings extend constructionist accounts of emotion to encompass difficulties in controlled semantic retrieval.

How do valence and meaning interact? The contribution of semantic control

“…This is consistent with theory that perception of discrete emotions relies on semantic knowledge (Lindquist et al, 2015). Indeed, perception of emotion categories is impaired following deficits in semantic storage (Lindquist et al, 2014) and semantic control (Souter, Lindquist, & Jefferies, 2021). Matching words by valence may require participants to focus on a specific feature of a concept while disregarding others that together determine global similarity.…”

“…Interestingly, facial emotions can cue appropriate interpretation of ambiguous words that have both positive and negative meanings in SA (Lanzoni et al, 2019), suggesting that emotional features can modulate semantic control demands by constraining retrieval. SA patients also show some deficits in accessing emotions from facial portrayals; common control processes may constrain the retrieval of both meaning and emotion (Souter, Lindquist, & Jefferies, 2021).…”

Motivated semantic control: Exploring the effects of extrinsic reward and self‐reference on semantic retrieval in semantic aphasia

“…A preliminary investigation demonstrated that gamification may facilitate the rehabilitation of word production following stroke (Romani et al, 2019). The current findings extend this study to show that SA patients can benefit from this strategy, despite deficits of semantic control being accompanied by difficulties in constraining internal representational states in domains beyond semantic cognition, including emotion perception (Souter, Lindquist, et al, 2021) and episodic memory (Stampacchia et al, 2018). These findings merit further investigation of the use of gamified extrinsic incentives in addressing post‐stroke impairments in semantic control.…”

“…Given this distinction, there is a need to investigate the effects of motivation in tasks with high semantic control demands to establish if this domain can benefit from 'gamification' strategies to the same degree as other cognitive tasks. Furthermore, evidence suggests affective abnormalities in SA, including the ability to categorise facial portrayals according to discrete emotion categories (Souter, Lindquist, & Jefferies, 2021). This is thought to reflect deficits in constraining internal states beyond the conceptual domain, which may extend to and, therefore, limit modulatory effects of motivation.…”

Mapping lesion, structural disconnection, and functional disconnection to symptoms in semantic aphasia

“…It may be that impaired semantic control does not necessitate executive impairment (Chapman et al, 2020), but that the proximity of these substrates means that these functions are frequently impaired together. Frequent damage to substrates underlying semantic or domain-general control or both in SA may give rise to broad deficits in constraining internal aspects of cognition (Souter et al, 2021; Stampacchia et al, 2018), reflected in heightened susceptibility to external cues and miscues in semantic retrieval (Jefferies et al, 2008; Noonan et al, 2010), along with strong effects of distractors in semantic decision-making (Corbett et al, 2011; Noonan et al, 2010).…”