Multimodal Emotion Integration in Bipolar Disorder: An Investigation of Involuntary Cross-Modal Influences between Facial and Prosodic Channels

Abstract

The ability to integrate information from different sensory channels is a vital process that serves to facilitate perceptual decoding in times of unimodal ambiguity. Despite its relevance to psychosocial functioning, multimodal integration of emotional information across facial and prosodic modes has not been addressed in bipolar disorder (BD). In light of this paucity of research we investigated multimodal processing in a BD cohort using a focused attention paradigm. Fifty BD patients and 52 healthy controls completed a task assessing the cross-modal influence of emotional prosody on facial emotion recognition across congruent and incongruent facial and prosodic conditions, where attention was directed to the facial channel. There were no differences in multi-modal integration between groups at the level of accuracy, but differences were evident at the level of response time; emotional prosody biased facial recognition latencies in the control group only, where a fourfold increase in response times was evident between congruent and incongruent conditions relative to patients. The results of this study indicate that the automatic process of integrating multimodal information from facial and prosodic sensory channels is delayed in BD. Given that interpersonal communication usually occurs in real time, these results have implications for social functioning in the disorder.

Emotion regulation in bipolar disorder: Profile and utility in predicting trait mania and depression propensity

“…Indeed, BD patients do evidence deficits across a number of cognitive and emotional processes (e.g., Rossell et al, , 2014Van Rheenen and Rossell, 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, of which many may not be instrumental to the disorder's cause but might rather represent outcomes secondary to BD itself. This may not be the case here, given that the different pattern of associations with trait mania found within the BD group compared to controls suggests a fundamental change in emotion regulation during BD, which may partially underlie its clinical phenotype.…”

Crossmodal Audiovisual Emotional Integration in Depression: An Event-Related Potential Study

“…The underlying neurocognitive processes that integrate separate streams of information from different sensory channels into the overall experience are often referred to as multisensory integration (MSI) ( 23 ). Researchers focused on healthy adults ( 18 ), patients with bipolar disorder ( 24 ), and patients with schizophrenia ( 25 , 26 ) showed that multisensory integration of emotional cues is beneficial because the integration of information from multiple channels will increase the recognition speed and hit rate of emotional information.…”

Negative bias effects during audiovisual emotional processing in major depression disorder

“…Emotional information and perception in natural environments are rarely based on only one sensory modality (De Gelder & Bertelson, 2003). In daily life, the emotional stimulation of several sensory modalities often occurs simultaneously, and the cross-modal emotional influences between different sensory channels are thought to be strong (Van Rheenen & Rossell, 2014). This multimodal emotional integration is responsible for enriching perception, compensating for conflicts in cross-modal sensation and facilitating perceptual decoding in times of unimodal ambiguity (De Gelder & Bertelson, 2003;Dolan, Morris, & De Gelder, 2001;Pourtois, Gelder, Bol, & Crommelinck, 2005).…”