The Comprehensive Affect Testing System-Abbreviated: Effects of Age on Performance

Abstract

Deficits in the ability to recognize emotions in others have been noted in a wide variety of disorders, ranging from the psychiatric to the neurologic. Emotions are vital to social interactions, yet there are currently few standardized neuropsychological measures in common use to assess emotion perception abilities. This study examined the effects of age on performance of the Comprehensive Affect Testing System, a new assessment battery designed to measure perception of emotion via facial affect, prosody, and semantic content. Age was not associated with a significant decline in performance on facial tasks, although there was a significant age effect when discrete emotions were examined. Age was strongly associated with a decline in performance on prosody and cross-modal tasks, and this decline was independent of the decline in fluid ability that also accompanies the aging process. The results underscore the need for standardized instruments to assess emotion recognition abilities.

Cocaine Users Manifest Impaired Prosodic and Cross-Modal Emotion Processing

“…In accordance with prior studies, older age was associated with a particular decline in performance on prosody (25), whereas better attention performance correlated with more accurate general emotion, facial affect, and prosody recognition and better working memory with better prosody recognition (45). Furthermore, concordant with a previous study applying the MSCEIT (20) and the CATS-A, respectively (25), in our study, higher IQ scores were associated with better general and prosodic emotion recognition. Moreover, corroborating our finding from the first assessment of the present study sample (23), demonstrating that a smaller social network correlated with deficient emotional empathy, here, a larger total social network size was associated with better general emotion and prosody recognition.…”

“…Strikingly similar results with regard to prosodic processing have been reported for schizophrenia patients and it has been suggested that due to their specific nature, the deficits may occur further downstream at the level of complex emotion comprehension (45). Moreover, results derived from human neuroimaging and brain lesion studies (25, 46) have revealed that particularly right inferior frontal and striatal regions are implicated in prosodic processing. Therefore, the notion that drug-induced neuroadaptations in frontostriatal regions in CU (6, 8–11, 13) may contribute to deficient prosody processing appears plausible.…”

“…The CATS-A is an abbreviated, computerized version of the comprehensive affect testing system (25, 38). The test comprises of visual (Ekman basic emotions) and auditory stimulus material either requiring facial affect recognition, identification of non-emotional and emotional prosodic information, as well as simultaneous cross-modal processing of conflicting prosody and lexical content or distinguishing of incongruent facial expressions and prosodic information.…”

“…For this purpose, participants completed the abbreviated version of the comprehensive affect testing system (CATS-A) (25). The CATS-A enables the measurement of multisensory integration of facial and vocal affect perception across the three channels of facial affect, prosody, and semantic content.…”

Can you hear what I feel? A validated prosodic set of angry, happy, and neutral Italian pseudowords

“…To our knowledge, validated prosodic stimulipseudowords or pseudoutterances-are not yet available in Italian. The few studies addressing the emotional processing of prosodic stimuli have generally used prosodic subtests of emotion recognition batteries (such as the Comprehensive Affect Testing System; Schaffer, Wisniewski, Dahdah, & Froming, 2009), in which actors produce sentences with different emotional tones (Ariatti, Benuzzi, & Nichelli, 2008;Castagna et al, 2013). Although most of the above-mentioned sets of stimuli covered a wide range of basic emotions, we chose to focus on angry, happy, and neutral emotional prosody.…”