Neural correlates of impaired vocal emotion perception:
New insights from principal component analysis
-
1
University of New South Wales, PSYCHOLOGY, Australia
Thousands of Australians suffer from a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) each year, resulting in chronic interpersonal dysfunction and a reliance on government services. Individuals who have sustained a severe TBI predominantly experience impairments in vocal and facial recognition of emotion. Through a principal component analysis (PCA) of event related potentials (ERPs) the present study aimed to examine whether TBI impairments in prosodic processing are due to perceptual or cognitive deficits in light of Schirmer and Kotz's (2006) model. Electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded from 19 adults with severe TBI and 19 demographically matched healthy controls while they completed a same-different emotional prosody word pair task. Participants were required to indicate with a button press if word 2 was spoken in the same (i.e., angry-angry, happy-happy, neutral-neutral) or different (i.e., angry-happy, happy-angry) emotional prosody as word 1. ERPs to word 1 and word 2 were derived for trials with correct responding, and their amplitudes were quantified in separate PCAs for each group (TBI, control) and word (1, 2). ERP and behavioural measures were assessed in relation to prosodic valence (positive/happy vs. negative/angry), emotional tone (neutral vs. emotional), and word pair congruence (same vs. different). Across the groups poorer behavioural performance was seen in the happy than angry, neutral than emotional, and different than same word pairs. Interestingly, TBI performance was poorer than controls only in the word pair congruence analysis. The PCAs revealed some difference in the ERP component sequence between word 1 and 2, and also between the controls and TBIs. Furthermore, these components were differentially modulated by prosodic valence, emotional tone, and word pair congruence. The complex pattern of results has implications for Schirmer and Kotz's (2006) prosodic processing model and provides significant insight into the processing of vocal emotion.
References
Schirmer, A. & Kotz, S. A. (2006). Beyond the right hemisphere: Brain mechanisms mediating vocal emotional processing. Trends in Cognitive Science, 10(1), 24-30.
Keywords:
Traumatic brain injury (TBI),
principal component analysis (PCA),
Emotional prosody,
vocal emotion perception,
Event Related Potential (ERP),
cognitive deficits,
Perceptual Deficits
Conference:
ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Sydney, Australia, 2 Dec - 4 Dec, 2015.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Psychophysiology
Citation:
Kershaw
KA,
Rushby
JA,
McDonald
S,
De Blasio
FM,
Sufani
C,
Fisher
AC and
Iredale
JM
(2015). Neural correlates of impaired vocal emotion perception:
New insights from principal component analysis.
Conference Abstract:
ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.219.00003
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
31 Oct 2015;
Published Online:
30 Nov 2015.
*
Correspondence:
Ms. Kelly A Kershaw, University of New South Wales, PSYCHOLOGY, SYDNEY, NSW, 2052, Australia, kellyannkershaw77@hotmail.com