Impaired Emotional Prosody Processing in Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: An Event-Related Potential Study
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1
University of New South Wales, Psychology, Australia
Aims: Impaired communicative competence is well-documented among individuals with a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). These impairments may in part result from a reduced perception of paralinguistic cues, such as emotional prosody which help inform judgments about another’s emotional state. This study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the neural mechanisms of emotional prosody perception in TBI, within the framework of Schirmer and Kotz’s (2006) model of vocal emotion perception. Methods: Nineteen adults with severe TBI (15 male, age 46.1, education 12.5, average post-traumatic amnesia 66.78 days, average time post-injury 12.5 y), and 18 neurologically-healthy controls (11 males, age 43.9, education 15.4) completed a discrimination task which presented semantically-neutral word pairs from five prosody conditions (happy/happy, angry/angry, neutral/neutral, angry/happy, happy/angry); participants were required to judge the emotional prosody as the ‘same’ or ‘different’ whilst electroencephalogram and accuracy were recorded. Results: Preliminary analyses indicated that ERPs were larger in control compared with TBI participants, and were larger in central than lateral sites for both emotion categories compared with neutral, whereas the converse was found in TBI ,who showed a hemisphere > midline topography, but no topographical differentiation across frontal/posterior regions (F = 4.26, p = .046). This difference was also reflected in reduced accuracy for both emotion conditions for TBI group. Conclusions: TBI participants were not impaired in sensory processing of acoustic cues or recognition of emotional salience in acoustic cues. In regards to cognition and evaluative judgement however, TBI participants showed obvious differences in both ERP morphology, and behavioural outcomes, compared with controls. These findings are consistent with the frontal and posterior poles being more vulnerable to damage in TBI.
Keywords:
emotion,
Prosody,
ERP,
Severe traumatic brain injury,
Sensory Processing*
Conference:
ASP2013 - 23rd Annual meeting of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Wollongong, Australia, 20 Nov - 22 Nov, 2013.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Emotion
Citation:
Rushby
JA,
McDonald
S,
Froreich
F,
Fisher
A and
Iredale
J
(2013). Impaired Emotional Prosody Processing in Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: An Event-Related Potential Study.
Conference Abstract:
ASP2013 - 23rd Annual meeting of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.213.00035
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Received:
24 Oct 2013;
Published Online:
05 Nov 2013.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Jacqueline A Rushby, University of New South Wales, Psychology, Randwick, NSW, 2031, Australia, j.rushby@unsw.edu.au