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Neurol Sci (2008) 29:219227 DOI 10.1007/s10072-008-0971-9
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Recognition of emotions from visual and prosodic cues in Parkinsons disease
Alessandra Ariatti Francesca Benuzzi Paolo Nichelli
Received: 2 March 2008 / Accepted in revised form: 3 July 2008 Springer-Verlag 2008
Abstract Objective To assess whether Parkinson Disease (PD) patients are impaired at perceiving emotions from facial and prosodic cues and whether any putative defective performance concerns recognition of a particular emotion. Background Braak et al. [1] demonstrated that in different stages PD pathology involves the nigrostriatal system, the amygdala, and the insular cortex. Discrete brain lesions to these structures can cause selective deficits in recognising facial and prosodic stimuli expressing particular emotions. However, the investigation of facial and prosodic emotional processing in PD patients has lead to conflicting results. Materials and methods We compared 27 cognitively unimpaired PD patients with control subjects by means of the Facial Emotion Recognition Battery and the Emotional Prosody Recognition Battery. Results PD patients were impaired in recognising, selecting, and matching facial affects. In particular, the Facial Emotion Recognition Battery demonstrated a severe impairment in recognising sad and fearful faces. In the Emotional Prosody Recognition Battery PD patients demonstrated a diffuse impairment, including the recognition of emotional and propositional prosody. Conclusions Face emotion processing is impaired in PD patients, with a disproportionate deficit
involving fear and sadness. The pattern of face expression processing impairment in PD patients might depend on the regional distribution of the pathology. The widespread involvement of both emotional and propositional prosodic processing parallels the aprosodic characteristics of Parkinsonian speech production.
Keywords Parkinsons disease Emotions Facial expressions Emotional prosody
Introduction
Both neuropsychological and neuroimaging data support the notion that cortical and subcortical regions are involved in processing emotions form facial and prosodic cues. A large number of different structures participate in recognising the facial expression of emotions: among them, the occipito-temporal cortex, the amygdala, the orbito-frontal cortex, the basal ganglia, and the right parietal cortex [2]. In contrast, studies on emotional prosody do not clearly indicate any similar neural network. In general, recognising emotions from prosody alone is more difficult than recognising emotions from facial expressions. Certain emotions, such as disgust, can be recognized only very poorly from prosody. The recognition of emotions from the voice draws on...