Judgment of emotional information expressed by prosody and semantics in patients with unipolar depression

Abstract

It was the aim of this study to investigate the impact of major depressive disorder (MDD) on judgment of emotions expressed at the verbal (semantic content) and non-verbal (prosody) level and to assess whether evaluation of verbal content correlate with self-ratings of depression-related symptoms as assessed by Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). We presented positive, neutral, and negative words spoken in happy, neutral, and angry prosody to 23 MDD patients and 22 healthy controls (HC) matched for age, sex, and education. Participants rated the valence of semantic content or prosody on a 9-point scale. MDD patients attributed significantly less intense ratings to positive words and happy prosody than HC. For judgment of words, this difference correlated significantly with BDI scores. No such correlation was found for prosody perception. MDD patients exhibited attenuated processing of positive information which generalized across verbal and non-verbal channels. These findings indicate that MDD is characterized by impairments of positive rather than negative emotional processing, a finding which could influence future psychotherapeutic strategies as well as provide straightforward hypotheses for neuroimaging studies investigating the neurobiological correlates of impaired emotional perception in MDD.

Neural correlates of processing emotional prosody in unipolar depression

“…Moreover, MDD patients pay less attention to happy faces (Duque & Vázquez, ), classify them more frequently as neutral (Gur et al, ; Surguladze et al, ), and perceive them as less intensive (Joormann & Gotlib, ; Yoon, Joormann, & Gotlib, ) than HC. Analogous to results in the facial domain, studies on perception of emotional prosody revealed a negative bias of MDD patients for ambiguous stimuli (Kan, Mimura, Kamijima, & Kawamura, ) and reduced perception of positive prosody (Liu, Wang, Zhao, Ning, & Chan, ; Schlipf et al, ). Neuroimaging studies in healthy subjects demonstrated that the middle part of the right superior temporal gyrus (STG; Ethofer et al, ; Ethofer, Van De Ville, Scherer, & Vuilleumier, ; Grandjean et al, ; Wiethoff et al, ) as well as the amygdala (Fecteau, Belin, Joanette, & Armony, ; Frühholz et al, 2011; Liebenthal, Silbersweig, & Stern, ; Wiethoff, Wildgruber, Grodd, & Ethofer, ) show enhanced reactivity to emotional prosody and thus represent key areas within the network involved in affective sound processing (Frühholz, Trost, & Kotz, ).…”

How Major Depressive Disorder Affects the Ability to Decode Multimodal Dynamic Emotional Stimuli

“…Kan et al (2004) exploiting mute video and audio recordings found a poorer decoding accuracy of surprise for the audio stimuli. Schlipf et al (2013) reported that depressed subjects are impaired in processing positive emotional words exploiting a set of emotional adjectives (of positive, negative, and neutral valence) administered through speech vocal presentation.…”

“…This states that it is a universal and innate human ability to recognize the facial expressions corresponding to the six emotions called basic or primary (happiness, surprise, disgust, sadness, fear, and anger). The effectiveness of people with depression in decoding emotional expressions through photos was investigated with several methodologies, including the morphing task (Bediou et al, 2005;Joormann and Gotlib, 2006;Gilboa-Schechtman et al, 2008;LeMoult et al, 2009;Schaefer et al, 2010;Aldinger et al, 2013), the emotion recognition task (Kan et al, 2004;Leppänen et al, 2004;Gollan et al, 2008Gollan et al, , 2010Uekermann et al, 2008;Wright et al, 2009;Douglas and Porter, 2010;Milders et al, 2010;Naranjo et al, 2011;Punkanen et al, 2011;Péron et al, 2011;Watters and Williams, 2011;Schneider et al, 2012;Schlipf et al, 2013;Chen et al, 2014), the emotion attentional task (Gotlib et al, 2004;Joormann and Gotlib, 2007;Leyman et al, 2007;Kellough et al, 2008;Sanchez et al, 2013;Duque and Vázquez, 2014), the matching task (Milders et al, 2010;Liu et al, 2012;Chen et al, 2014), and the dot-probe detection task (Fritzsche et al, 2010).…”

“…On the contrary, multimodal dynamic stimuli have greater ecological validity and allow to investigate the amount of emotional information conveyed not only by the visual channel but also by the auditory one and by the combination of visual and auditory signals. Nevertheless, a few studies, only recently, exploit dynamic emotional stimuli to investigate on the depressed subjects' ability to decode emotional expressions using either audio or audio/video stimuli (Kan et al, 2004;Uekermann et al, 2008;Naranjo et al, 2011;Punkanen et al, 2011;Péron et al, 2011;Schlipf et al, 2013).…”

A Pilot Study on the Decoding of Dynamic Emotional Expressions in Major Depressive Disorder

“…It was both found that depressed subjects are slow and less accurate [1,3,10,12,14,20,34,41], as well as, fast and more accurate in decoding negative emotions [25,26,28,39]. In general, it was found that depressed subjects may exhibit a global deficit in decoding emotions [4,18,31] and be less accurate than healthy subjects in decoding happiness [21,23,24,27,35,37]. Since all the above results were obtained exploiting mostly static stimuli and/or only one communication mode (only audio or only video), the goal of the present study is to investigate on the ability of depressed patients to decode emotional multimodal dynamic stimuli.…”