Investigating Cerebello-Frontal Circuits Associated with Emotional Prosody: A Double-Blind tDCS and fNIRS study.

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).)