Neural Processing of Emotional Prosody across the Adult Lifespan

Abstract

Emotion recognition deficits emerge with the increasing age, in particular, a decline in the identification of sadness. However, little is known about the age-related changes of emotion processing in sensory, affective, and executive brain areas. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated neural correlates of auditory processing of prosody across adult lifespan. Unattended detection of emotional prosody changes was assessed in 21 young (age range: 18–35 years), 19 middle-aged (age range: 36–55 years), and 15 older (age range: 56–75 years) adults. Pseudowords uttered with neutral prosody were standards in an oddball paradigm with angry, sad, happy, and gender deviants (total 20% deviants). Changes in emotional prosody and voice gender elicited bilateral superior temporal gyri (STG) responses reflecting automatic encoding of prosody. At the right STG, responses to sad deviants decreased linearly with age, whereas happy events exhibited a nonlinear relationship. In contrast to behavioral data, no age by sex interaction emerged on the neural networks. The aging decline of emotion processing of prosodic cues emerges already at an early automatic stage of information processing at the level of the auditory cortex. However, top-down modulation may lead to an additional perceptional bias, for example, towards positive stimuli, and may depend on context factors such as the listener's sex.

Gender Differences in the Recognition of Vocal Emotions

“…Similarly, Lambrecht et al ( 2014 ) demonstrated a significant female advantage in emotion recognition which was however restricted to vocal emotions. A female advantage was also found in studies investigating emotion recognition purely within the vocal domain (e.g., Scherer et al, 2001 ; Toivanen et al, 2005 ; Paulmann and Uskul, 2014 ; Demenescu et al, 2015 ). These findings were corroborated by Keshtiari and Kuhlmann ( 2016 ), who investigated how gender affects the recognition of vocal expressions of emotion.…”

“…Subsequent evidence showed that females outperform males for utterances spoken in a fearful (Demenescu et al, 2015 ; Zupan et al, 2016 ), happy (Fujisawa and Shinohara, 2011 ; Lambrecht et al, 2014 ; Demenescu et al, 2015 ; Zupan et al, 2016 ), and sad (Fujisawa and Shinohara, 2011 ; Zupan et al, 2016 ) tone of voice. While both genders were found to perform equally well when identifying angry (Fujisawa and Shinohara, 2011 ; Lambrecht et al, 2014 ; Demenescu et al, 2015 ; Zupan et al, 2016 ), and neutral (Demenescu et al, 2015 ) prosody, other investigators failed to replicate these findings and found higher accuracy for females in correctly recognizing neutral vocalizations (Lambrecht et al, 2014 ), or no gender differences in the recognition of sad prosody (Demenescu et al, 2015 ). That the accuracy of performance varies across discrete emotion categories (e.g., fear, sadness or happiness was argued to play a greater role in women, whereas anger and disgust in men) might be the result of biological or environmental factors, which are likely to trigger “qualitatively” different emotional experiences for men and women (see Schirmer, 2013 , for a comprehensive review).…”

“…Similar to the performance accuracy of decoding emotions, the evidence with regard to speaker's gender as a relevant factor for identifying emotions from the voice is inconsistent [see Table 1 (b1) for overall identification rates by speakers' gender and (b2) for identification rates by speakers' gender and emotion category]. The discrepancies in these findings are likely to be attributable to a number of methodological differences, such as recording conditions (e.g., Burkhardt et al, 2005 ), number of speakers which vary from 2 (e.g., Demenescu et al, 2015 ) to 14 (Toivanen et al, 2005 ) or validity of prosodic stimuli derived from the simulation of emotional expressions (see Hawk et al, 2009 ; Jürgens et al, 2015 , for a discussion whether authentic vs. play acted emotional speech may lower ecological validity).…”

Emotional Prosody Effects on Verbal Memory in Euthymic Patients With Bipolar Disorder

“…An independent group of 30 older adults (M age = 70.9 years; SD = 4.9 years; 15 males) rated the three versions according to valence on a 7-point scale (1, absolutely negative to 7, absolutely positive). We chose to control the prosody manipulation in a group of older adults since much research has shown that emotion and affective information processing impairments emerge with age (57). Our reasoning was that if healthy older adults could correctly detect the prosody of each story, then the versions could be considered positive, negative, or neutral.…”

<p>Senescent Decline in Verbal-Emotion Identification by Older Hearing-Impaired Listeners – Do Hearing Aids Help?</p>

“… 2–4 There is substantial evidence that the ability to identify vocally transmitted emotions tends to decrease with increasing age. 5 , 6 However, there is no consensus as to the underlying mechanism(s) responsible for this decline (for a discussion, see Mitchell 7 ): Is it the primary consequence of differential aging and degradation in neural mechanisms subtending emotion processing (eg, in the fontal and medial temporal lobes) 8 , 9 or a secondary effect mediated by the ubiquitous age-related changes in hearing sensitivity 10 , 11 and cognitive functioning 12 associated with the aging process? Recent clinical interest for this aging phenomenon is based on the assumption that an impairment in the processing of voice emotion is associated with lower quality of life, poorer social relationships, and greater levels of depression.…”