Attending to the Sound of Feelings: An ERP Investigation of Vocal Emotion Perception Deficits in Traumatic Brain Injured Patients
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1
University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Australia
Aims:
Severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) may result in reduced sensitivity to vocal expressions of emotions. This deficit can negatively impact psycho-social adjustment and functioning post-injury. The present study utilized event-related potential analysis (ERP) to investigate whether perceptual or cognitive stages of vocal emotion perception (Schirmer & Kotz, 2006) are implicated following severe TBI.
Method:
Fifteen adults with severe TBI and 15 demographically-matched healthy control participants completed an emotional tone oddball task whilst electroencephalography (EEG) equipment recorded ERP amplitudes and peak-latency. In the oddball task, participants were told to detect and click in response to the rare presentation of emotional (i.e., happy, angry and disgusted) vocal expressions, embedded in a frequent series of distractors (i.e., neutral vocal expressions). Participants were then asked to label these vocal expression of emotions in a forced-choice identification task.
Results:
At early perceptual stages of processing (200ms), the TBI group showed a significant increase in N2 amplitudes to happy tones and a decrease in N2 amplitudes to angry and disgust tones. Similarly, at later cognitive stages of processing (400ms), the TBI group also showed an increase in N4 amplitudes to happy tones and a decrease in N4 amplitudes to angry tones. However, peak latency analysis revealed that the TBI group exhibited significantly attenuated ERPs at early and later stages of processing. Behaviour analysis confirmed that there was a general reduction in the detection and identification of emotional tones for the TBI group.
Conclusion:
Although the present ERP amplitude data indicated early and late deficits in vocal emotion perception, it was concluded that information processing speed - as evidenced by the attenuation of peak latencies - accounted for the reduced behavioural detection and identification of vocal expressions.
References
Schimer A., & Kotz, S. (2006). Beyond the right hemisphere: Brain mechanisms mediating vocal emotional processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 24-30.
Keywords:
TBI,
vocal emotion perception,
Prosody,
Perception,
ERPs (Event-Related Potentials)
Conference:
Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Inc, Coffs Harbour, Australia, 26 Nov - 28 Nov, 2014.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Psychophysiology
Citation:
Sufani
C,
Rushby
JA and
McDonald
S
(2014). Attending to the Sound of Feelings: An ERP Investigation of Vocal Emotion Perception Deficits in Traumatic Brain Injured Patients.
Conference Abstract:
Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Inc.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2014.216.00006
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Received:
15 Oct 2014;
Published Online:
02 Dec 2014.
*
Correspondence:
Mr. Christopher Sufani, University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia, christopher.sufani@gmail.com