Effects of Positive and Negative Emotions on Picture Naming for People With Mild-to-Moderate Aphasia: A Preliminary Investigation

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to investigate how emotional arousal and valence affect confrontational naming accuracy and response time (RT) in people with mild-to-moderate aphasia compared with adults without aphasia. We hypothesized that negative and positive emotions would facilitate naming for people with aphasia (PWA) but lead to slower responses for adults with no aphasia. Method: Eight participants with mild-to-moderate aphasia, 15 older adults (OAs), and 17 young adults (YAs) completed a confrontational naming task across three conditions (positive, negative, and neutral) in an ABA (where A = neutral and B = negative) case series design. Immediately following each naming condition, participants self-reported their perceived arousal and pleasure. Accuracy and RT were measured and compared. Results: As expected, PWA performed significantly less accurately and with longer RTs than both YA and OA groups across all conditions. However, opposite our hypothesis for the aphasia group, the negative condition resulted in decreased accuracy for the aphasia and the OA group and increased RT across all groups. No statistically significant differences were found between the positive and any other condition. Participants with aphasia who demonstrated an effect in the negative condition were observed to produce a larger proportion of semantically related errors than any other error types. Conclusions: Findings suggest that strong negative emotions can interfere with semantic–lexical processing by diverting attentional resources to emotion regulation. Both clinicians and researchers should be aware of the potential influence of negative stimuli and negative emotional states on language performance for PWA, and these effects should be disentangled in future research. Further research should also be conducted with a larger number of participants with aphasia across a broader range of severity to replicate and extend findings. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.19119356

Specific Character of Arbitrary Regulation in Various Forms of Aphasia

“…It is from the level of its development and preservation (stability of health) in the factors inherent in healthy ontogenesis that the entire further line of human activity and selfmanifestation, his reactions in society, in the world around him, his self-manifestation and personal influence on surrounding people and the world as a whole will be reflected. This shows the importance of restoring and preserving arbitrary regulation at the level of expensive ontogenesis, where a balance of creative self-expression with the preservation of personal interests and intelligent, cultural self-expression is manifested, reflecting tactics and politeness when interacting with others and creative personal influence on the world and society, which will preserve the balance of well-being of life in society and in the world as a whole [20]. Thus, the revealed effective data on the peculiarities of arbitrary regulation in different forms of aphasia will allow to predict aspects related to the further interaction of a patient with aphasia with others, dictating the importance of conducting neurorehabilitation therapy for this category of patients, taking into account the identified results, which will more competently help the specialist create conditions for interaction with patients with sensory and with patients with motor aphasia, directing his neurorehabilitation activity aimed at restoring healthy psychophysical parameters of arbitrary regulation.…”

Understanding and Addressing the Individualized Emotional Impact of Aphasia: A Framework for Speech-Language Pathologists

“…For example, although Ramsberger (1996) showed that emotional words facilitated repetition, individual participant responses varied with 70% (14/20) experiencing a facilitatory effect and 25% (5/20) experiencing an interference effect. Similarly, despite group effects for decreased accuracy and increased response time in the negative condition, Harmon et al (2022) found that one participant increased accuracy and two participants decreased response time. When studying discourse in aphasia, Kreindler et al (1980) found no emotional condition effect in relation to speech fluency but emphasized that this was because the condition interfered with fluency for some individual PWA and facilitated fluency for others.…”

“…PWA generally performed least accurately and with greatest response times in the negative compared with the other two conditions. Although the former study revealed possible trends toward interference in the positive condition that were not statistically significant (Harmon et al 2022), the latter study found significant differences in accuracy and response time between positive and neutral conditions across several tasks (Blackett 2021). Taken together, these findings indicate that emotional arousal may interfere with naming in aphasia, but that these effects are more robust for negative than for positive emotional stimuli.…”

“…Repeating and naming emotional words or pictures have typically been shown to impact word production for PWA but in different ways: Repeating emotional words may either facilitate or have minimal effects (Bakhtiyari et al 2015;Ramsberger 1996), whereas naming emotional (particularly negative) words and/or pictures seems to interfere (Blackett 2021;Harmon et al 2022). Examples of emotional words include positive words such as hope, kiss, and safe or negative words such as fear, hurt, and lose.…”