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Previous research suggests that emotional prosody perception is impaired in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease (AD) and primary progressive aphasia (PPA). However, no previous research has investigated emotional prosody perception in these diseases under non-ideal listening conditions. We recruited 18 patients with AD, and 31 with PPA (nine logopenic (lvPPA); 11 nonfluent/agrammatic (nfvPPA) and 11 semantic (svPPA)), together with 24 healthy age-matched individuals. Participants listened to speech stimuli conveying three emotions in clear and noise-vocoded forms and had to identify the emotion being conveyed. We then conducted correlation analyses between task performance and measures of socio-emotional functioning. All patient groups showed significant impairments in identifying clear emotional prosody compared to healthy individuals. These deficits were exacerbated under noise-vocoded conditions, with all patient groups performing significantly worse than healthy individuals and patients with lvPPA performing significantly worse than those with svPPA. Significant correlations with social cognition measures were observed more consistently for noise-vocoded than clear emotional prosody comprehension. These findings open a window on a dimension of real-world emotional communication that has often been overlooked in dementia, with particular relevance to social cognition, and begin to suggest a novel candidate paradigm for investigating and quantifying this systematically., Competing Interests: Declarations. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests. Ethics approval: All participants gave informed consent to take part in the study, in accordance with Declaration of Helsinki guidelines. Ethical approval was granted by the University College London-National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery Joint Research Ethics Committees., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

The emotional and cognitive cerebellum has been explored by several studies in the past years. Recent evidence suggested the possible contribution of the cerebellum in processing emotional prosody, namely the ability to comprehend the emotional content of a given vocal utterance, likely mediated by anatomical and functional cerebello-prefrontal connections. In the present study, the involvement of a functional cerebello-prefrontal network in recognising emotional prosody was assessed by combining non-invasive anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the right or the left cerebellum and functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy of the prefrontal cortex, in a double-blind within-subject experimental design on healthy participants. The results showed that right and, to a less extent, left cerebellar tDCS (as compared to sham stimulation) reduced neural activation in the prefrontal cortex while accuracy and reaction times at the vocal recognition task remained unchanged. These findings highlight functional properties of the cerebello-frontal connections and the psychophysiological effects of cerebellar brain stimulation, with possible clinical applications in psychiatric and neurological conditions., Competing Interests: Declarations. Ethics approval: The study was approved by the Institutional Ethic Committee and were in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments. Consent to participate: All participants gave their written informed consent to participate. Consent for publication: All authors consent to publication; all participants gave their written informed consent to publication. Conflicts of interest: The authors declare no competing interests. Open practice statement: Data or materials for the experiments are available upon request, and none of the experiments was preregistered., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

In this study, we investigated whether self-relevant information can accelerate the processing of emotional information. Our experiment, based on a passive auditory oddball paradigm, involved recording electroencephalography while participants listened to stimuli comprising their own names (ONs) and unfamiliar names (UNs) spoken with varying emotional prosody. At 220-300 ms, mismatch negativity (MMN) was more negative for ONs and angry prosody than for UNs and neutral prosody, respectively. These results suggest that attention is involuntarily attracted by ONs and emotional prosody, and that both types of information are given priority processing, even under pre-attentive conditions. Importantly, ONs with angry prosody induced more negative MMN than did similar UNs and ONs with neutral prosody, which indicates that the motivational significance embedded in angry prosody promotes the self-reference effect and, thus, involves more attention resources. At 300-500 ms, ONs triggered smaller P3a than did UNs, suggesting that less cognitive resources are required to process self-relevant information. These results suggest that self-relevant and emotional information of preferential processing interact with each other during the pre-attentive stage, with self-reference enhancing the processing of emotional information., (© 2021 Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.)

There is growing evidence of the cerebellum's contribution to emotion processing from neuroimaging studies of healthy function and clinical studies of cerebellar patients. As demonstrated initially in the motor domain, one of the cerebellum's functions is to construct internal models of an individual's state and make predictions about how future behaviors will impact that state. By utilizing widespread connections with neocortex and subcortical regions such as the basal ganglia, the cerebellum can monitor and modulate precisely timed patterns of events using prediction and reward-based error feedback in a diverse range of tasks including auditory emotion prosody recognition. In coordination with a broader affective network, the cerebellum helps to select and refine emotional responses that are the most rewarded in a particular context, strengthening neural activity in relevant regions to form a representational chunk. This chunked set of affective stimuli, cognitive evaluations, and physiological responses subsequently can be enacted as a unitary response (i.e., an emotional habit) more quickly and with less attentional control than for a novel stimulus or goal-oriented action. Such emotional habits can allow for efficient, automatic, stimulus-triggered responses while maintaining the flexibility to adapt output when prediction errors signal a renewed need for cerebellar modification of cortical activity, or, conversely, may lead to behavioral or mood disorders when habitual responses persist despite negative consequences., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.)

Background: Perinatal brain injury affects around 300,000 neonates in China each year, early diagnosis and active intervention are also crucial for timely treatment and better prognoses. As hearing is the earliest as well as the most sensitive sense to develop in neonates, we propose that the ability to differentiate among different emotional prosodies may differ between neonates with and without brain injuries., Methods: We enrolled full-term neonates admitted to the neonatology department of Peking University First Hospital from January 2016 to December 2016, conducted functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) monitoring within 24 hr of admission, and analyzed changes in oxyhemoglobin (ΔHbO 2 ) and deoxyhemoglobin (ΔHb) to study the ability of neonates to differentiate among emotional prosodies. The neonates were followed up to 36 months for neurological outcome evaluation., Results and Conclusions: We found that neonates showed the early ability to differentiate among emotional prosodies, responding most sensitively to positive emotions, and this ability may have been impaired following brain injury., (© 2020 The Authors. International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Society for Developmental Neuroscience.)

The subthalamic nucleus (STN) is involved in different aspects of emotional processes and more specifically in emotional prosody recognition. Recent studies on the behavioral effects of deep brain stimulation (DBS) in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) have uncovered an asymmetry in vocal emotion decoding in PD, with left-onset PD patients showing deficits for the processing of happy voices. Whether and how PD asymmetry affects STN electrophysiological responses to emotional prosody, however, remains unknown. In the current study, local field potential activity was recorded from eight left- and six right-lateralized motor-onset PD patients (LOPD/ROPD) undergoing DBS electrodes implantation, while they listened to angry, happy and neutral voices. Time-frequency decomposition revealed that theta (2-6 Hz), alpha (6-12 Hz) and gamma (60-150 Hz) band responses to emotion were mostly bilateral with a differential pattern of response according to patient's sides-of onset. Conversely, beta-band (12-20 Hz and 20-30 Hz) emotional responses were mostly lateralized in the left STN for both patient groups. Furthermore, STN theta, alpha and gamma band responses to happiness were either absent (theta band) or reduced (alpha and gamma band) in the most affected STN hemisphere (contralateral to the side-of onset), while a late low-beta band left STN happiness-specific response was present in ROPD patients and did not occur in LOPD patients. Altogether, in this study, we demonstrate a complex pattern of oscillatory activity in the human STN in response to emotional voices and reveal a crucial influence of disease laterality on STN low-frequency oscillatory activity., (Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Purpose: The study aimed at testing the effect of supra segmental training on vocal emotional prosody perception of children with hearing impairment. The objectives of the study were to compare the perception of vocal emotional prosody (happy, sad, and neutral) in children with hearing impairment with and without a short-term prosody training and to draw correlations between the vocal emotional prosody perception scores and the subject factors - chronological age, age of hearing aid fitting, duration of the intensive intervention (speech, language and auditory training without breaks more than 30 days) and language age in children with hearing impairment., Method: Thirty children with hearing impairment in the age range of 4.1-9.2 years with a language age of 3-7 years participated in the study. The authors formulated 24 concrete Malayalam sentences and their picture representations and these were recorded under three emotional variations (happy, sad, and neutral). Using random sampling, the thirty participants were divided into the control group (CWHI) and the experimental (CWHIt) group. The study was carried out in two phases; phase 1 (training) attended by only the experimental group and phase 2 (testing) attended by both the groups., Results: There was a significant difference between CWHI and CWHIt in the happy, sad, and neutral vocal emotional prosody conditions. Chronological age, duration of speech-language-auditory training, and language age showed a positive correlation with the vocal emotional prosody perception scores; and no correlation was found between the age of fitting of hearing aids and the emotion perception scores., Conclusion: The results of the study points out that with adequate prosody training, the children with hearing impairment using benefiting hearing aids could improve their vocal emotional prosody perception. Owing to the role of prosody perception in speech & language, social and cognitive development, the supra segmental training should be made an integral part of the assessment and management intervention strategies., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The objective of this study was to explore the brain modifications associated with vocal emotion (i.e., emotional prosody) processing deficits in patients with Parkinson's disease after deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus, and the impact of motor asymmetry on these deficits. We therefore conducted 18-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography scans of 29 patients with left- or right-sided motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease before and after surgery, and correlated changes in their glucose metabolism with modified performances on the recognition of emotional prosody. Results were also compared with those of a matched healthy control group. Patients with more left-sided motor symptoms exhibited a deficit in vocal emotion recognition for neutral, anger, happiness and sadness in the preoperative condition that was normalized postoperatively. Patients with more right-sided motor symptoms performed comparably to controls in the preoperative condition, but differed significantly on fear postoperatively. At the metabolic level, the improvement observed among patients with left-sided motor symptoms was correlated with metabolic modifications in a right-lateralized network known to be involved in emotional prosody, while the behavioral worsening observed among patients with right-sided motor symptoms was correlated with metabolic modifications in the left parahippocampal gyrus and right cerebellum. We suggest that surgery has a differential impact on emotional processing according to motor symptom lateralization, and interpret these results as reflecting the (de)synchronization of the limbic loop in the postoperative condition., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors report no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

The ability to recognize others' emotions based on vocal emotional prosody follows a protracted developmental trajectory during adolescence. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms supporting this maturation. The current study investigated age-related differences in neural activation during a vocal emotion recognition (ER) task. Listeners aged 8 to 19 years old completed the vocal ER task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The task of categorizing vocal emotional prosody elicited activation primarily in temporal and frontal areas. Age was associated with a) greater activation in regions in the superior, middle, and inferior frontal gyri, b) greater functional connectivity between the left precentral and inferior frontal gyri and regions in the bilateral insula and temporo-parietal junction, and c) greater fractional anisotropy in the superior longitudinal fasciculus, which connects frontal areas to posterior temporo-parietal regions. Many of these age-related differences in brain activation and connectivity were associated with better performance on the ER task. Increased activation in, and connectivity between, areas typically involved in language processing and social cognition may facilitate the development of vocal ER skills in adolescence.

While the role of the cerebellum in emotion recognition has been explored with facial expressions, its involvement in the auditory modality (i.e., emotional prosody) remains to be demonstrated. The present study investigated the recognition of emotional prosody in 15 patients with chronic cerebellar ischaemic stroke and 15 matched healthy controls, using a validated task, as well as clinical, motor, neuropsychological, and psychiatric assessments. We explored the cerebellar lesion-behaviour relationship using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Results showed a significant difference between the stroke and healthy control groups, with patients giving erroneous ratings on the Surprise scale when they listened to fearful stimuli. Moreover, voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping revealed that these emotional misattributions correlated with lesions in right Lobules VIIb, VIIIa,b and IX. Interestingly, the posterior cerebellum has previously been found to be involved in affective processing, and Lobule VIIb in rhythm discrimination. These results point to the cerebellum's functional involvement in vocal emotion decoding., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Emotion processing impairments are common in patients undergoing brain surgery for fronto-temporal tumour resection, with potential consequences on social interactions. However, evidence is controversial concerning side and site of lesions causing such deficits. This study investigates visual and auditory emotion recognition in brain tumour patients with the aim of clarifying which lesion sites are related to impairments in emotion processing from different modalities. Thirty-four patients were evaluated, before and after surgery, on facial expression and emotional prosody recognition; voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) analyses were performed on patients' post-surgery MRI images. Results showed that patients' performance decreased after surgery in both visual and auditory modalities, but, in general, recovered 3 months after surgery. In facial expression recognition, left brain-damaged patients showed greater post-surgery deterioration than right brain-damaged ones, whose performance specifically decreased for sadness and fear. VLSM analysis revealed two segregated areas in the left hemisphere accounting for post-surgery scores for happy (fronto-temporo-insular region) and surprised (middle frontal gyrus and inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus) facial expressions. Our findings demonstrate that surgical removal of tumours in the fronto-temporal region produces impairment in facial emotion recognition with an overall recovery at 3 months, suggesting a partially different representation of positive and negative emotions in the left and right hemispheres for visually - but not auditory - presented emotions; moreover, we show that deficits in specific expression recognition are associated with discrete lesion locations., (© 2017 The British Psychological Society.)

Aims: We employed a discrimination-choice procedure, embedded in a custom-made videogame, to evaluate whether youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), including nonverbal individuals, distinguish sentences on the basis of emotional tone-of-voice and generalize linguistic information across speaker gender., Methods and Procedures: Thirteen youth with ASD (7-21 years) and 13 age-matched typical controls heard pairs of pre-recorded sentences varying in lexical content and prosody (e.g., enthusiastic "Dave rode a bike'' vs. grouchy "Mark held a key''). After training to select a target sentence, participants heard test probes comprising re-combinations of the content and prosodic features of the sentences. Interspersed generalization trials used a voice opposite in gender to the voice used in training., Outcomes and Results: Youth with ASD were less accurate than controls in discriminating sentences based on emotional tone-of-voice. Nonverbal and verbal youth did not differ in this regard. The ASD group showed only slight decrements in generalizing to the opposite-gender voice., Conclusions and Implications: The finding of intact generalization of linguistic information across male/female speakers contrasts with the widely held view that autism is characterized by deficits in generalization. This suggests the need to test generalization under varying task demands to identify limits on performance., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The possible hemispheric specialization of the basal ganglia during emotional prosody (i.e., vocal emotion) processing has still to be elucidated. Coupled with affective measures and neuroimaging, Parkinson's disease offers a unique opportunity to study this question, on account of its characteristically asymmetric striatal dysfunction, which translates into predominantly contralateral motor symptoms. We investigated the cerebral metabolic bases of emotional prosody recognition in patients with Parkinson's disease with left- versus right-lateralized motor symptoms, postulating that patients with greater right hemispheric brain dysfunction have a specific impairment that correlates with the metabolic modification of a brain network known to be involved in emotional prosody. A total of 38 patients performed a validated emotional prosody recognition task and underwent a resting-state F-18 fluorodeoxyglucose PET scan, as well as clinical, motor, neuropsychological, and psychiatric assessments. Patients' performances were compared with those of 45 healthy controls. As expected, vocal emotion recognition was significantly poorer among patients with left-sided motor symptoms than among both right-sided patients and controls. There was no significant difference between right-sided patients and controls. This effect was observed for both the total score and the happiness subscore. Interestingly, regressions showed that the greater the emotional misattribution, the greater the patients' age and asymmetric motor symptom severity. Finally, at the metabolic level, positive correlations were found between the happiness recognition subscore and the metabolism of the right orbitofrontal cortex in patients with left-sided motor symptoms. A right orbitofrontal-basal ganglia coupling seems to be specifically involved in the vocal emotion recognition deficit observed in Parkinson's disease. The asymmetry of motor symptoms is thus an important clinical factor, in that it may influence the presence or severity of affective disorders in Parkinson's disease., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Background: Alcoholism is associated with difficulties in perceiving emotions through nonverbal channels including prosody. The question whether these difficulties persist to long-term abstinence has, however, received little attention., Methods: In a 2-part investigation, emotional prosody production was investigated in long-term abstained alcoholics and age- and education-matched healthy controls. First, participants were asked to produce semantically neutral sentences in different emotional tones of voice. Samples were then acoustically analyzed. Next, naïve listeners were asked to recognize the emotional intention of speakers from a randomly collected subset. Voice quality indicators were also assessed by the listeners., Results: Findings revealed emotional prosody production differences between the 2 groups. Differences were particularly apparent when looking at pitch use. Alcoholics' mean and variability of pitch differed significantly from controls' use. The use of loudness was affected to a lesser extent. Crucially, naïve raters confirmed that the intended emotion was more difficult to recognize from exemplars produced by alcoholics. Differences between the 2 groups were also found with regard to voice quality., Conclusions: These results suggest that emotional communication difficulties can persist long after alcoholics have quit drinking., (Copyright © 2018 by the Research Society on Alcoholism.)

The present electrophysiological study investigated the processing of emotional prosody by minimizing as much as possible the effect of emotional information conveyed by the lexical-semantic context. Emotionally colored French vowels (i.e., happiness, sadness, fear, and neutral) were presented in a mismatch negativity (MMN) oddball paradigm. Both the MMN, i.e., an event-related potential (ERP) component thought to reflect preattentive change detection, and the P3a, i.e., an ERP marker of involuntary orientation of attention toward deviant stimuli, were significantly modulated by the emotional deviants compared to the neutral ones. Critically, the largest amplitude (MMN, P3a) and the shortest peak latency (MMN) were observed for fear deviants, all other things being equal. Taken together, the present findings lend support to a sequential neurocognitive model of emotion processing (Scherer, 2001) which postulates, among other checks, a first stage of automatic emotion detection (MMN) followed by a second stage of subjective evaluation of the stimulus or event (P3a). Consistently with previous studies, our data suggest that among the six universal emotions, fear could have a special status probably because of its adaptive role in the evolution of the human species., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

To explore how cultural immersion modulates emotion processing, this study examined how Chinese immigrants to Canada process multisensory emotional expressions, which were compared to existing data from two groups, Chinese and North Americans. Stroop and Oddball paradigms were employed to examine different stages of emotion processing. The Stroop task presented face-voice pairs expressing congruent/incongruent emotions and participants actively judged the emotion of one modality while ignoring the other. A significant effect of cultural immersion was observed in the immigrants' behavioral performance, which showed greater interference from to-be-ignored faces, comparable with what was observed in North Americans. However, this effect was absent in their N400 data, which retained the same pattern as the Chinese. In the Oddball task, where immigrants passively viewed facial expressions with/without simultaneous vocal emotions, they exhibited a larger visual MMN for faces accompanied by voices, again mirroring patterns observed in Chinese. Correlation analyses indicated that the immigrants' living duration in Canada was associated with neural patterns (N400 and visual mismatch negativity) more closely resembling North Americans. Our data suggest that in multisensory emotion processing, adopting to a new culture first leads to behavioral accommodation followed by alterations in brain activities, providing new evidence on human's neurocognitive plasticity in communication.

Writing over a century ago, Darwin hypothesized that vocal expression of emotion dates back to our earliest terrestrial ancestors. If this hypothesis is true, we should expect to find cross-species acoustic universals in emotional vocalizations. Studies suggest that acoustic attributes of aroused vocalizations are shared across many mammalian species, and that humans can use these attributes to infer emotional content. But do these acoustic attributes extend to non-mammalian vertebrates? In this study, we asked human participants to judge the emotional content of vocalizations of nine vertebrate species representing three different biological classes-Amphibia, Reptilia (non-aves and aves) and Mammalia. We found that humans are able to identify higher levels of arousal in vocalizations across all species. This result was consistent across different language groups (English, German and Mandarin native speakers), suggesting that this ability is biologically rooted in humans. Our findings indicate that humans use multiple acoustic parameters to infer relative arousal in vocalizations for each species, but mainly rely on fundamental frequency and spectral centre of gravity to identify higher arousal vocalizations across species. These results suggest that fundamental mechanisms of vocal emotional expression are shared among vertebrates and could represent a homologous signalling system., (© 2017 The Author(s).)

Using intracranial local field potential (LFP) recordings in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS), we explored the electrophysiological activity of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in response to emotional stimuli in the auditory modality. Previous studies focused on the influence of visual stimuli. To this end, we recorded LFPs within the STN in response to angry, happy, and neutral prosodies in 13 patients with PD who had just undergone implantation of DBS electrodes. We observed specific modulation of the right STN in response to anger and happiness, as opposed to neutral prosody, occurring at around 200-300ms post-onset, and later at around 850-950ms post-onset for anger and at around 3250-3350ms post-onset for happiness. Taken together with previous reports of modulated STN activity in response to emotional visual stimuli, the present results appear to confirm that the STN is involved in emotion processing irrespective of stimulus valence and sensory modality., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Using ERPs, we explored the relationship between social power and emotional prosody processing. In particular, we investigated differences at early and late processing stages between individuals primed with high or low power. Comparable to previously published findings from nonprimed participants, individuals primed with low power displayed differentially modulated P2 amplitudes in response to different emotional prosodies, whereas participants primed with high power failed to do so. Similarly, participants primed with low power showed differentially modulated amplitudes in response to different emotional prosodies at a later processing stage (late ERP component), whereas participants primed with high power did not. These ERP results suggest that high versus low power leads to emotional prosody processing differences at the early stage associated with emotional salience detection and at a later stage associated with more in-depth processing of emotional stimuli., (© 2016 Society for Psychophysiological Research.)

Information processing has been suggested to depend on the current state of the brain as well as stimulus characteristics (e.g. salience). We compared processing of salient stimuli (subject's own names [SONs] and angry voice [AV] stimuli) to processing of unfamiliar names (UNs) and neutral voice (NV) stimuli across different vigilance stages (i.e. wakefulness as well as sleep stages N1 and N2) by means of event-related oscillatory responses during wakefulness and a subsequent afternoon nap. Our findings suggest that emotional prosody and self-relevance drew more attentional resources during wakefulness with specifically AV stimuli being processed more strongly. During N1, SONs were more arousing than UNs irrespective of prosody. Moreover, emotional and self-relevant stimuli evoked stronger responses also during N2 sleep suggesting a 'sentinel processing mode' of the brain during this state of naturally occurring unconsciousness. Finally, this initial preferential processing of salient stimuli during N2 sleep seems to be followed by an inhibitory sleep-protecting process, which is reflected by a K-complex-like response., (Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The current study employed behavioral and electrophysiological measures to investigate the timing, localization, and neural oscillation characteristics of cortical activities associated with phonetic and emotional information processing of speech. The experimental design used a cross-modal priming paradigm in which the normal adult participants were presented a visual prime followed by an auditory target. Primes were facial expressions that systematically varied in emotional content (happy or angry) and mouth shape (corresponding to /a/ or /i/ vowels). Targets were spoken words that varied by emotional prosody (happy or angry) and vowel (/a/ or /i/). In both the phonetic and prosodic conditions, participants were asked to judge congruency status of the visual prime and the auditory target. Behavioral results showed a congruency effect for both percent correct and reaction time. Two ERP responses, the N400 and late positive response (LPR), were identified in both conditions. Source localization and inter-trial phase coherence of the N400 and LPR components further revealed different cortical contributions and neural oscillation patterns for selective processing of phonetic and emotional information in speech. The results provide corroborating evidence for the necessity of differentiating brain mechanisms underlying the representation and processing of co-existing linguistic and paralinguistic information in spoken language, which has important implications for theoretical models of speech recognition as well as clinical studies on the neural bases of language and social communication deficits., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

There is increasing interest in the understanding of emotion recognition deficits in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), the most common form of focal epilepsies. There are conflicting reports about impairments for different emotions in right and left temporal lobe epilepsy patients. A systematic review and a narrative synthesis was conducted for studies investigating emotion recognition (ER) in TLE. Embase, MEDLINE, PsychINFO and Pubmed were searched from 1990 to March 2015 and reference lists were reviewed. 996 citations were identified and 43 studies were finally included. ER deficits are consistently observed across studies. A fear recognition deficit is always reported, followed by deficits in sadness and disgust recognition. Deficits are observed across visual and auditory domains. Conflicting evidence is present concerning the severity of ER deficits in right and left TLE. Studies on anterior temporal lobectomy report data similar to that observed in pre-surgical patients. Current evidence supports the conclusion that recognition of negative emotions is commonly impaired in TLE, particularly for fear, and in the visual domain. Future work should focus on more ecologically valid test, on longitudinal studies to assess the role of anterior temporal lobectomy, and to correlate ER measures to social functioning in everyday life., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Aim: The aim of the study was to verify the hypothesis about the relationship between the efficiency of executive functions and emotional prosody and linguistic prosody among patients with recurrent depressive disorder (rDD)., Materials and Methods: The study comprised 80 subjects, patients with rDD. Assessment of cognitive function was based on performance of the Trail Making Test (TMT), the Stroop Test, the Verbal Fluency Test (VFT), the Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT), Ruff Figural Fluency Test (RFFT) and emotional prosody and linguistic prosody., Results: Efficiency of emotional prosody is linked to the execution of one part of the test VFT. Efficiency in the language prosody goes hand in hand with the speed of execution of both parts of the TMT, correctness of the implementation of VFT and RFFT. A negative impact of depressive symptoms only for language prosody was observed., Conclusions: Deficits in the recognition of emotional stimuli in depression are not necessarily limited to visual information, but may also apply to non-verbal auditory stimuli (prosody). The severity of symptoms of depression impairs efficiency of linguistic prosody. The efficiency of frontal functions (both visual-spatial and verbal-auditory) is related to the ability of patients to use non-verbal communication of emotional information., (© 2015 MEDPRESS.)

Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) show cognitive and behavioral disorders, which they and their caregivers have difficulties to cope with in daily life. Psychological symptoms seem to be increased by impaired emotion processing in patients, this ability being linked to social cognition and thus essential to maintain good interpersonal relationships. Non-verbal emotion processing is a genuine way to communicate, especially so for patients whose language may be rapidly impaired. Many studies focus on emotion identification in AD patients, mostly by means of facial expressions rather than emotional prosody; even fewer consider emotional prosody production, despite its playing a key role in interpersonal exchanges. The literature on this subject is scarce with contradictory results. The present study compares the performances of 14 AD patients (88.4±4.9 yrs; MMSE: 19.9±2.7) to those of 14 control subjects (87.5±5.1 yrs; MMSE: 28.1±1.4) in tasks of emotion identification through faces and voices (non linguistic vocal emotion or emotional prosody) and in a task of emotional prosody production (12 sentences were to be pronounced in a neutral, positive, or negative tone, after a context was read). The Alzheimer's disease patients showed weaker performances than control subjects in all emotional recognition tasks and particularly when identifying emotional prosody. A negative relation between the identification scores and the NPI (professional caregivers) scores was found which underlines their link to psychological and behavioral disorders. The production of emotional prosody seems relatively preserved in a mild to moderate stage of the disease: we found subtle differences regarding acoustic parameters but in a qualitative way judges established that the patients' productions were as good as those of control subjects. These results suggest interesting new directions for improving patients' care.

To understand how culture modulates on-line neural responses to social information, this study compared how individuals from two distinct cultural groups, English-speaking North Americans and Chinese, process emotional meanings of multi-sensory stimuli as indexed by both behaviour (accuracy) and event-related potential (N400) measures. In an emotional Stroop-like task, participants were presented face-voice pairs expressing congruent or incongruent emotions in conditions where they judged the emotion of one modality while ignoring the other (face or voice focus task). Results indicated that while both groups were sensitive to emotional differences between channels (with lower accuracy and higher N400 amplitudes for incongruent face-voice pairs), there were marked group differences in how intruding facial or vocal cues affected accuracy and N400 amplitudes, with English participants showing greater interference from irrelevant faces than Chinese. Our data illuminate distinct biases in how adults from East Asian versus Western cultures process socio-emotional cues, supplying new evidence that cultural learning modulates not only behaviour, but the neurocognitive response to different features of multi-channel emotion expressions., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Recent studies have demonstrated the positive effects of musical training on the perception of vocally expressed emotion. This study investigated the effects of musical training on event-related potential (ERP) correlates of emotional prosody processing. Fourteen musicians and fourteen control subjects listened to 228 sentences with neutral semantic content, differing in prosody (one third with neutral, one third with happy and one third with angry intonation), with intelligible semantic content (semantic content condition--SCC) and unintelligible semantic content (pure prosody condition--PPC). Reduced P50 amplitude was found in musicians. A difference between SCC and PPC conditions was found in P50 and N100 amplitude in non-musicians only, and in P200 amplitude in musicians only. Furthermore, musicians were more accurate in recognizing angry prosody in PPC sentences. These findings suggest that auditory expertise characterizing extensive musical training may impact different stages of vocal emotional processing., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

We describe the epilepsy features and emotion recognition abilities (recognition of basic facial emotions and recognition of emotional prosody) in a patient with Urbach-Wiethe disease with bilateral amygdala calcifications. Our data, supported by ictal video-EEG recording, indicated that our patient suffered from mesial temporal lobe epilepsy. Emotion recognition abilities were compared to those of healthy controls and those of patients with bilateral mesial temporal lobe epilepsy. Our patient showed a selective impairment of the recognition of facial expression of fear, whereas recognition of emotional prosody was preserved, in contrast to bilateral mesial temporal lobe epilepsy patients that presented with deficits in both domains. We also reviewed the literature on epilepsy in Urbach-Wiethe disease (41 patients). Our findings suggest that in Urbach-Wiethe disease, the circumscribed damage of both amygdalae results in a selective dysfunction of fearful face processing, in contrast to bilateral mesial temporal lobe epilepsy patients who present with a widespread and multimodal impairment in the judgement of emotional stimuli.

Emotion can be expressed by both the voice and face, and previous work suggests that presentation modality may impact emotion recognition performance in individuals with schizophrenia. We investigated the effect of stimulus modality on emotion recognition accuracy and the potential role of visual attention to faces in emotion recognition abilities. Thirty-one patients who met DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia (n=8) or schizoaffective disorder (n=23) and 30 non-clinical control individuals participated. Both groups identified emotional expressions in three different conditions: audio only, visual only, combined audiovisual. In the visual only and combined conditions, time spent visually fixating salient features of the face were recorded. Patients were significantly less accurate than controls in emotion recognition during both the audio and visual only conditions but did not differ from controls on the combined condition. Analysis of visual scanning behaviors demonstrated that patients attended less than healthy individuals to the mouth in the visual condition but did not differ in visual attention to salient facial features in the combined condition, which may in part explain the absence of a deficit for patients in this condition. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that patients benefit from multimodal stimulus presentations of emotion and support hypotheses that visual attention to salient facial features may serve as a mechanism for accurate emotion identification., (© 2013.)

Unlabelled: We examined the understanding of emotional speech by children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We predicted that they would have difficulty understanding emotional speech, not because of an emotional prosody processing impairment but because of problems drawing appropriate inferences, especially in multiple-cue environments. Twenty-six children and adolescents with ASD and 26 typically developing controls performed a computerized task featuring emotional prosody, either embedded in a discrepant context or without any context at all. They must identify the speaker's feeling. When the prosody was the sole cue, participants with ASD performed just as well as controls, relying on this cue to infer the speaker's intention. When the prosody was embedded in a discrepant context, both ASD and TD participants exhibited a contextual bias and a negativity bias. However ASD participants relied less on the emotional prosody than the controls when it was positive. We discuss these findings with respect to executive function and intermodal processing., Learning Outcomes: After reading this article, the reader should be able to (1) describe the ASD participants pragmatic impairments, (2) explain why ASD participants did not have an emotional prosody processing impairment, and (3) explain why ASD participants had difficulty inferring the speaker's intention from emotional prosody in a discrepant situation., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

• Normal aging adversely impacts certain linguistic prosodic parameters in prosody perception assessments. • Parkinson's disease affects not only language prosodic parameters but also emotional parameters in prosody perception assessments. • It is recommended to include prosody perception as part of communication assessments for individuals with Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects approximately 1%–2% of individuals aged 60 and above. Communication disorders in PD can significantly impact the overall quality of life. As prosody plays a vital role in verbal communication, the present study examines Persian prosody perception in PD, focusing on linguistic and emotional aspects of prosody. This cross-sectional study aimed to compare the perception of linguistic and emotional prosody in three groups: middle-aged adults (n = 22; mean age = 50.40 years), healthy older adults (n = 22; mean age = 68.31 years), and individuals with Parkinson's disease (n = 22; mean age = 65years). All individuals with PD were classified in stages 1; 1.5; 2; 2.5, and 3 of the disease using the Hoehn and Yahr scale. All participants had an MMSE score of 24 or above. The Florida Affect Battery (FAB) was used to evaluate prosody perception. This Battery was validated in the Persian language and its reliability and validity were reported as 94 % and 100 % respectively. Participants with PD presented significantly lower scores than the older adults in all subtests of the FAB (p < 0.05), while healthy older adults were significantly different only in linguistic discrimination (β = -2.14; -3.68 to -0.61), and linguistic naming of prosody (β = 1.25; 0.17 to 2.33) compared to middle-aged adults. The present study sheds light on the influence of PD on Persian prosody perception. Given the crucial role of prosody in verbal communication, these findings enhance our understanding of communication disorders in PD and could bring attention to consider prosody perception, among other aspects, when assessing individuals affected by PD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Krystyna Pisarkowa emphasises the importance of means which participate in shaping the expression of emotions in a poetic text, and calls for extracting from the text “essential ingredients from seemingly minor semantic accents” (Pisarkowa 1998: 36). In this article, the author takes this inspiration and analyses how Wisława Szymborska applies silence in her poems as an aesthetic category and an expression of choked emotions, what indicators of silence she uses, and what happens with this silence in the translation of her poems into German by Karl Dedecius. The author concludes that a translator should be able to empathise with emotions and be an intermediary not only for the word, but also for the unspoken [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decades, parenting researchers increasingly focused on the role of fathers in child development. However, it is still largely unknown which factors contribute to fathers' beliefs about their child, which may be crucial in the transition to fatherhood. In the current randomized within-subject experiment, the effect of nasal administration of vasopressin (AVP) on both Five Minute Speech Sample-based (FMSS) expressed emotion and emotional content or prosody was explored in 25 prospectivefathers. Moreover, we explored how the transition to fatherhood affected these FMSS-based parameters, using prenatal and early postnatal measurements. Analyses revealed that FMSS-based expressed emotion and emotional content were correlated, but not affected by prenatal AVP administration. However,child's birth was associated with an increase in positivity and a decrease in emotional prosody, suggesting that the child's birth is more influential with regard to paternal thoughts and feelings than prenatal AVP administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and purpose: Non-motor impairment such as emotion recognition deficit in both facial and vocal expressions has been previously reported in Parkinson's disease (PD). We investigated whether the decoding of emotional prosody is impaired in PD and whether this deficit is related to striatal damage. Methods: Fifteen PD patients and 15 healthy controls (HCs) were requested to listen to six audio tracks and to recognize the emotions expressed by a professional actor while reading a meaning-neutral sentence. All subjects also received a structural MRI examination. Volumetric measurements were extracted for the striatum, a key region involved in emotional processing and typically impaired in PD. Results: Decoding sadness conveyed by voice was impaired in PD compared with HC and was related to the volume of the dorsal striatum bilaterally. Conclusions: The dorsal striatum is involved in the decoding of vocal negative emotions in PD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Deficits in emotional prosody processing have been observed in bipolar disorder (BD). While recent neural studies have explored impaired processing of facial expressions, little is known about deficits in emotional speech processing, or the specific stages of processing at which they occur. This study examined if pre-attentive detection and attention to emotional speech is impaired in BD, relative to healthy individuals.Methods: The EEG data was collected from 14 individuals with BD and 14 healthy control (HC) participants while the auditory stimuli was presented via a passive three-stimulus oddball sequence which included emotionally (neutral, happy, sad) spoken syllables and acoustically matched nonvocal tones. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were evaluated in terms of Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and P3a (event-related potentials signals).Results: Individuals with BD showed normal MMN amplitude, but significantly delayed MMN latency and reduced P3a amplitude in response to the emotional syllables compared to HC.Limitations: Small sample size, lack of control of psychopharmacological intervention and no inclusion of an affective prosody-labelling task.Conclusions: The finding that changes in emotional speech prosody in the pre-attentive stages of processing (MMN) were unimpaired in individuals with BD; while automatic orientation towards emotionally salient speech (P3a) was reduced compared to HC, suggests that vocal emotional cues may not be recognised as salient by individuals with BD, resulting in fewer attentional resources allocation to further processing. This may lead to poorer integration of auditory emotional cues and other sensory information and negatively impact interpersonal and psychosocial functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of evidence on social anxiety (SA)-linked attentional biases to threat comes from research using facial expressions. Emotions are, however, communicated through other channels, such as voice. Despite its importance in the interpretation of social cues, emotional prosody processing in SA has been barely explored. This study investigated whether SA is associated with enhanced processing of task-irrelevant angry prosody. Fifty-three participants with high and low SA performed a dichotic listening task in which pairs of male/female voices were presented, one to each ear, with either the same or different prosody (neutral or angry). Participants were instructed to focus on either the left or right ear and to identify the speaker’s gender in the attended side. Our main results show that, once attended, task-irrelevant angry prosody elicits greater interference than does neutral prosody. Surprisingly, high socially anxious participants were less prone to distraction from attended-angry (compared to attended-neutral) prosody than were low socially anxious individuals. These findings emphasise the importance of examining SA-related biases across modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background and Objectives: Social anxiety (SA) is associated with a tendency to interpret social information in a more threatening manner. Most of the research in SA has focused on unimodal exploration (mostly based on facial expressions), thus neglecting the ubiquity of cross-modality. To fill this gap, the present study sought to explore whether SA influences the interpretation of facial and vocal expressions presented separately or jointly.Methods: Twenty-five high socially anxious (HSA) and 29 low socially anxious (LSA) participants completed a forced two-choice emotion identification task consisting of angry and neutral expressions conveyed by faces, voices or combined faces and voices. Participants had to identify the emotion (angry or neutral) of the presented cues as quickly and precisely as possible.Results: Our results showed that, compared to LSA, HSA individuals show a higher propensity to misattribute anger to neutral expressions independent of cue modality and despite preserved decoding accuracy. We also found a cross-modal facilitation effect at the level of accuracy (i.e., higher accuracy in the bimodal condition compared to unimodal ones). However, such effect was not moderated by SA.Limitations: Although the HSA group showed clinical cut-off scores at the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale, one limitation is that we did not administer diagnostic interviews. Upcoming studies may want to test whether these results can be generalized to a clinical population.Conclusions: These findings highlight the usefulness of a cross-modal perspective to probe the specificity of biases in SA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We aimed to explore the brain imaging correlates of vocal emotion processing in a group of HIV+ individuals and to compare the vocal emotion processing of HIV+ individuals with a group of healthy adults. We conducted multiple linear regressions to determine the cerebral correlates of a newly designed vocal emotion processing test in a sub-group of HIV+ individuals who completed the cerebral magnetic resonance scan ( n = 36). Separately, we test whether the association between our test scores and each cerebral measure persisted regardless of the presence of neurocognitive impairment. We also calculated differences in average test scores between the total HIV+ group ( n = 100) and a healthy adult group ( n = 46). We found a positive association between the test scores and several brain area volumes: right frontal, temporal and parietal lobes, bilateral thalamus, and left hippocampus. We found a negative association between inflammatory markers in frontal white matter and the test scores. After controlling by neurocognitive impairment, several brain area volumes remained positively associated to the prosody test scores. Moreover, the whole HIV+ sample had significantly poorer test scores than healthy adults, but only in the subset of HIV+ individuals with neurocognitive impairment. For the first time, our results suggest that cerebral dysfunctions in particular brain areas involved in the processing of emotional auditory stimuli may occur in HIV+ individuals. These results highlight the need for broad characterization of the neuropsychological consequence of HIV brain damages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A crossmodal effect has been observed in the processing of facial and vocal emotion in adults and infants. For the first time, we assessed whether this effect is present in childhood by administering a crossmodal task similar to those used in seminal studies featuring emotional faces (i.e., a continuum of emotional expressions running from happiness to sadness: 90% happy, 60% happy, 30% happy, neutral, 30% sad, 60% sad, 90% sad) and emotional prosody (i.e., sad vs. happy). Participants were 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children and a control group of adult students. The children had a different pattern of results from the adults, with only the 9-year-olds exhibiting the crossmodal effect whatever the emotional condition. These results advance our understanding of emotional prosody processing and the efficiency of cross-modal integration in children and are discussed in terms of a developmental trajectory and factors that may modulate the efficiency of this effect in children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]