Impaired affective prosody decoding in severe alcohol use disorder and Korsakoff syndrome

“What Did I Tell This Sad Person?”: Memory for Emotional Destinations in Korsakoff’s Syndrome

“…These findings suggest a compromised ability to process negative information in KS. The difficulty to process negative information in KS was reported by research demonstrating a compromised ability of patients to recognize negative facial expressions [29] and to decode negative voices [27]. The decreased ability of patients with KS to process negative information may be a result of disruption to the amygdala, as KS has been associated with extensive impairments in limbic structures (i.e., amygdala and mammillary bodies) [2,64].…”

“…For instance, patients with KS tend to display impaired social inference ability [25] as well as some socio-affective symptoms, such as apathy, disinterest, loss of initiative, and decreased social desirability [2]. Furthermore, patients with KS tend to demonstrate difficulties categorizing stimuli (e.g., pictures and words) according to their affective valence (i.e., neutral, positive, and negative) [26] as well as difficulties decoding negative voices, such as those depicting anger and fear [27]. Critically, patients with KS tend to demonstrate difficulty recognizing emotional expressions in the faces of others.…”

“…Afterward, we invited participants to remember the facts they previously told to each face. We expected lower destination memory in patients with KS than in control participants; we expected that these difficulties would be specifically observed for emotionally negative destinations, which was based on research demonstrating difficulty processing negative information in KS [27].…”

Identifying, Assessing, and Treating Korsakoff Syndrome Patients

“…Recent neuropsychiatric studies have compared “WKS + AUD patients” and “non-WKS AUD-only patients.” These useful studies have shown that the two groups show comparable rates of affective prosody (Brion et al, 2018a), executive dysfunction (Brion et al, 2014), impaired spatial and visual imagery (Bermejo-Velasco and Ruiz-Huete, 2006; Robin et al, 2020), and amnesia for specific earlier life events (Pitel et al, 2009). These findings indicate that certain AUD brain comorbidities may affect WKS patients in rates similar to matched AUD patients without WKS.…”