Impressions of parkinsonian patients from their recorded voices

Abstract

The voices of patients suffering from Parkinson's disease change in various ways. This paper sets out to examine the effect of these changes on the impressions made on listeners, and to try to see what vocalic and prosodic features account for these impressions. Tape recordings from segments of interviews with 4 patients, and 4 control subjects with ischaemic heart disease, were played to 16 naive listeners. These listeners were asked to rate their impressions of these voices on 15 dimensions of personality. There were significant differences on most of the dimensions, despite the fact that there were no differences between the two groups on such scales as Beck's depression inventory and the mood adjective check list. The parkinsonian patients were seen to be cold, withdrawn and anxious, not to relate well to the interviewer and to be enjoying the interview less than the controls. These ratings are very similar to those previously reported for the same patients, using silent video recordings only. The voice recordings were analysed along various dimensions of prosody. The factors which were different between the groups included the frequency and type of pauses in speech and the range or variability of the fundamental frequency. The implications of this exploratory study for intervention are discussed.

Is apathy a valid and meaningful symptom or syndrome in Parkinson's disease? A critical review.

“…The expressive mask is associated with poor social functioning and is a barrier to maintaining close relationships in PD (Brod, Mendelsohn, & Roberts, 1998;Ellgring et al, 1993;Karlsen, Tandberg, Arsland, & Larsen, 2000). Decades of research have shown that rehabilitation and health care practitioners unintentionally form inaccurate and negatively biased impressions of the emotions and personality traits of people with PD and expressive masking, even though these practitioners should be aware of the physical limitations of expressive masking (Borod et al, 1990;Brozgold et al, 1998;Pentland, Pitcairn, Gray, & Riddle, 1987;Pentland, Gray, Riddle, & Pitcairn, 1988;Pitcairn, Clemie, Gray, & Pentland, 1990;Tickle-Degnen & Lyons, 2004). Since Marin's (1990) assertion that apathy occurs frequently in neurological conditions such as AD, Frontotemporal Dementia, and PD, there has been interest in defining and measuring apathy.…”

How do I sound to me? Perceived changes in communication in Parkinson's disease

“…Candidate dimensions were derived from related literature 7,13,15,24 and from conversations with people with Parkinson's disease and other neurological speech disorders not involved in the study in response to being asked to choose important ways in which they felt communicating had changed. The 22 pairs finally chosen were agreed with the informants as reflecting their experience.…”

“…To our knowledge only one previous study 8 has included people with Parkinson's disease when using this technique to examine the impact of speech and communication problems, though others have employed it to assess health professionals' impressions of people with Parkinson's. 15 The aim of this study was to investigate perceived impact of Parkinson's disease on selfperception of communication using a semantic differential based questionnaire. We also sought to compare perceptions of people with Parkinson's disease with clinical measures of Parkinson's disease and with the views of their primary carer.…”

Thin-Slice Judgments in the Clinical Context

“…Indeed, overall, they were rated less positively: as more hostile, suspicious, bored, introverted, less intelligent, less likeable, and perceived to achieve less rapport. Linguistic and acoustic analyses of thin slices of the voice revealed that the Parkinson's disease patients had more pauses and varied their pitch less, which likely contributed to raters negative impressions (Pitcairn et al, 1990) as these are also vocal cues to depression (Mundt et al, 2007(Mundt et al, , 2012.…”