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 portrayed – with 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 age-matched controls. They successfully sorted portrayals that differed in valance (positive vs. negative) but had difficulty categorizing different negative emotions. 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 controls, 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.

Overlapping Neural Correlates Underpin Theory of Mind and Semantic Cognition: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis of 344 Functional Neuroimaging Studies

“…Conceptual knowledge critically underpins our capacity to recognise and interact with objects, words, people, and events in our environment (Patterson et al, 2007; Lambon Ralph et al, 2017), and Binney and Ramsey (2020) have argued that it should play a pivotal role in social cognition given that social interaction is, at its core, a process of meaningful exchange between persons. Support for this hypothesis has long existed within neuropsychological and comparative neuroscience literature, where there appears to be a tight coupling of general semantic deficits and social impairments (Bertoux et al, 2020; Irish et al, 2014; Klüver & Bucy, 1937; Miller et al, 2012; Souter et al, 2021; for a review see Olson et al, 2013 and Rouse et al, 2024). Evidence at the level of whole-brain networks has yet to be conclusively obtained.…”