The Sound of Feelings:Electrophysiological Responses Emotional Speech in Alexithymia

BACKGROUND: Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by difficulties in the cognitive processing of emotions (cognitive dimension) and in the experience of emotions (affective dimension). Previous research focused mainly on visual emotional processing in the cognitive alexithymia dimension. We investigated the impact of both alexithymia dimensions on electrophysiological responses to emotional speech in 60 female subjects. METHODOLOGY: During unattended processing, subjects watched a movie while an emotional prosody oddball paradigm was presented in the background. During attended processing, subjects detected deviants in emotional prosody. The cognitive alexithymia dimension was associated with a left-hemisphere bias during early stages of unattended emotional speech processing, and with generally reduced amplitudes of the late P3 component during attended processing. In contrast, the affective dimension did not modulate unattended emotional prosody perception, but was associated with reduced P3 amplitudes during attended processing particularly to emotional prosody spoken in high intensity. CONCLUSIONS: Our results provide evidence for a dissociable impact of the two alexithymia dimensions on electrophysiological responses during the attended and unattended processing of emotional prosody. The observed electrophysiological modulations are indicative of a reduced sensitivity to the emotional qualities of speech, which may be a contributing factor to problems in interpersonal communication associated with alexithymia

Functional cerebral asymmetries of emotional processes in the healthy and bipolar brain

The perception and processing of emotions are of primary importance for social interaction, which confers faculties such as inferring what another person’s feels. Brain organisation of emotion perception has shown to primarily involve right hemisphere functioning. However, the brain may be functionally organised according to fundamental aspects of emotion such as valence, rather than involving processing of emotions in general. It should be noted, however, that emotion perception is not merely a perceptual process consisting in the input of emotional information, but also involves one’s emotional response. Therefore, the functional brain organisation of emotional processing may also be influenced by emotional experience. An experimental model for testing functional cerebral asymmetries (FCAs) of valenced emotional experience is uniquely found in bipolar disorder (BD) involving impaired ability to regulate emotions and eventually leading to depressive or manic episodes. Previous models have only explained hemispheric asymmetries for manic and depressive mood episodes, but not for BD euthymia. The present thesis sought to investigate FCAs in emotional processing in two major ways. First, FCAs underlying facial emotion perception under normal functioning was examined in healthy controls. Secondly, functional brain organisation in emotional processing was further investigated by assessing FCAs in the bipolarity continuum, used as an experimental model for studying the processing of emotions. In contrast with previous asymmetry models, results suggested a right hemisphere involvement in emotional experience regardless of valence. Atypical FCAs were found in euthymic BD patients reflecting inherent aspects of BD functional brain organisation that are free of symptomatic influence. Also, BD patients exhibited atypical connectivity in a default amygdala network particularly affecting the right hemisphere, suggesting intrinsic mechanisms associated with internal emotional states. Last, BD patients were associated with a reduced right hemisphere specialisation in visuospatial attention, therefore suggesting that right hemisphere dysfunction can also affect non-emotional processes. Taken together, the findings emphasize a BD continuum model relying on euthymia as a bridging state between usual mood and acute mood phases

Exploring association between musical sophistication and emotion recognition in individuals differing in musical abilities

Dissertação de Mestrado Interuniversitário, Neuropsicologia Clínica e Experimental, 2021, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de PsicologiaMusic training and musical sophistication have been shown to be associated with nonmusical domains of cognition. Many authors argue that these associations demonstrate experience-driven neuroplasticity. This study attempts to replicate and lend additional support to the idea that both trained and untrained individuals with higher selfreported musical abilities can achieve similar performance levels in three identical emotion recognition tasks. In the current study, participants (N = 31) with different scores on the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index had to identify the emotion that best characterized each exemplar of faces, prosody or nonverbal vocalizations in separate tasks, using one of seven response options representing emotional labels. Contrary to the hypothesis, we did not find a significant association between musical sophistication and average accuracy scores in vocal emotion recognition tasks. Also, as predicted, we found no association between musical sophistication and recognition accuracy in the facial emotion task. An exploratory analysis revealed an association between musical sophistication and recognition of fear. These mixed findings are partly in line with the musical sophistication/musical training literature. Possible methodological pitfalls are discussed. Future studies are to continually improve on the current body of work with different techniques and research methods.A formação musical ao longo da vida e as aprendizagens a ela associadas apresentam-se como bons modelos para estudar a plasticidade do cérebro humano, na medida em que a prática de um instrumento, por exemplo, requer um conjunto de faculdades cognitivas que, por sua vez, estão relacionadas com determinadas estruturas e funções cerebrais implicadas no processamento de conteúdo cognitivo-afetivo. A especificidade deste tipo de processamento (com treino vs. sem treino musical) tem sido analisada em estudos de imagiologia cerebral, eletrofisiológicos e comportamentais que revelam efeitos de facilitação numa variedade de processos cognitivos de âmbito geral (e.g., funções executivas e inteligência) e particular (e.g., processamento da fala, linguagem escrita, capacidades visuoespaciais, etc). Deste modo, os investigadores argumentam que os correlatos encontrados constituem casos onde a neuroplasticidade é orientada pela experiência, através de um mecanismo que denominam de far transfer (“transferência longa”), uma vez que ocorre normalmente entre um domínio musical (e.g., aulas de canto/treino vocal) e um domínio não-musical (e.g., cognitivo). Por oposição, a near transfer (“transferência curta”) ocorre no mesmo domínio, no qual a aptidão aprendida tem aplicação imediata na tarefa experimental (e.g., aprender acordes e tocálos no instrumento). Ora, certos autores (Sala & Gobet, 2020) admitem que a formação musical não promove melhorias nas faculdades cognitivas ou na excelência académica, visto que a maioria dos estudos analisados são transversais e o impacto é nulo. Nestes casos, a validade ecológica pode ser posta em causa, uma vez que estes estudos usaram metodologias distintas e nem sempre as mais adequadas, variando quase sempre ao nível do delineamento da intervenção (e.g., individual ou grupal), das idades dos participantes e da operacionalização das variáveis representativas do treino musical e das faculdades cognitivas em foco. Além disso, a evidência de estudos longitudinais é escassa e apresenta igualmente um conjunto de limitações, entre as quais a não aleatorização dos participantes, a não utilização de condições controlo equivalentes ao treino musical e a falta de medidas de controlo adequadas (e.g., traços de personalidade, estatuto socioeconómico e indicadores de funcionamento cognitivo). Contudo, outros autores (Bigand & Tillmann, 2021) reanalisaram esses dados e demonstraram efeitos de transferência “modestos”, mas estatisticamente significativos, quando compararam os resultados das condições experimentais e de controlo de estudos de transferências longas. Assim sendo, a plasticidade induzida pelo treino poderá não explicar todas as diferenças entre músicos e indivíduos sem formação musical. De facto, a experiência musical ou os conhecimentos musicais são muitas vezes aferidos pela capacidade de tocar um instrumento musical e o nível de proficiência exibido, enquanto que outras capacidades que dizem respeito à relação do indivíduo com a música não são tidas em conta. Na literatura, esta relação é definida pelo conceito de sofisticação musical (“musical sophistication”; Mullensiefen et al., 2014), que engloba comportamentos e competências musicais numa diversidade de dimensões como o envolvimento ativo com a música (e.g., quanto tempo e recursos monetários são investidos em música), competências percetivas (e.g., audição musical), treino musical (e.g., treino musical formal recebido), competências de canto (e.g., performance vocal durante o canto), e envolvimento emocional com a música (e.g., capacidade de falar sobre emoções expressas pela música). Por conseguinte, é possível identificar estes comportamentos/competências na população em geral, e não só exclusivamente em músicos. Acresce que certos autores (e.g., Martins et al., 2021) reforçam que fatores preexistentes como predisposições genéticas podem favorecer o surgimento de competências musicais naturalmente boas em indivíduos sem treino musical. De facto, estudos recentes têm mostrado que boas competências de perceção musical em indivíduos sem treino musical estão relacionadas com melhores desempenhos em domínios não musicais (e.g., Mankel & Bidelman, 2018; Swaminathan & Schellenberg, 2017). Outros fatores, nomeadamente ambientais, como as faculdades cognitivas, a personalidade e o estatuto socioeconómico parecem, no entanto, predizer diferenças individuais no treino musical (Corrigall et al., 2013; Swaminathan & Schellenberg, 2018). Nas últimas duas décadas, tem havido interesse crescente em investigar aspetos do processamento socioemocional, nomeadamente a capacidade de reconhecer emoções através da voz e faces. Embora a música esteja intimamente ligada com processos emocionais e sociais, o estudo de efeitos de transferência para estes domínios tem conhecido tímidos avanços, sobretudo no que toca à sofisticação musical. O presente estudo teve como objetivo usar medidas explícitas de reconhecimento emocional para explorar associações entre a sofisticação musical, avaliada com recurso à adaptação portuguesa do Gold-MSI (Lima et al., 2020), e o reconhecimento de vozes e faces, com base na precisão das respostas dos participantes (em Hu scores; Wagner, 1993). Nesse sentido, três tarefas idênticas foram administradas a todos os participantes. Para cada tarefa, os participantes ou viam ou ouviam exemplares pré-selecionados de estímulos de três categorias (vocalizações não verbais, prosódia de discurso e expressões faciais) e tinham de identificar a qualidade emocional do estímulo apresentado com um de sete rótulos que representavam as seis emoções (raiva, nojo, medo, alegria, tristeza e neutralidade) e a opção “nenhuma das anteriores”, para quando a voz/face não expressasse nenhum dos estados emocionais atrás mencionados. Os participantes também responderam ao questionário Gold-MSI e a outros relativos a informação sociodemográfica e a sintomas de COVID-19, que, quando presentes, poderiam levar ao cancelamento da sessão experimental. Quanto às hipóteses, nós esperávamos que a sofisticação musical estivesse associada ao reconhecimento emocional de vozes, fosse para a prosódia de discurso ou para as vocalizações não verbais. Especificamente, em linha com Correia e colaboradores (2020), os participantes que reportassem maiores competências percetivas teriam um melhor desempenho no reconhecimento de vozes. Também esperávamos que a sofisticação musical não estivesse associada ao reconhecimento de expressões faciais. Ainda explorámos a possibilidade da sofisticação musical estar associada ao reconhecimento de emoções específicas para cada tarefa de reconhecimento. As análises de correlação não revelaram nenhuma associação entre a sofisticação musical e o reconhecimento de vozes e faces. Além disso, a associação encontrada para as faces foi negativa, ao contrário da nossa predição, sendo apenas verificada parcialmente. Assim, apesar de sustentarem a ideia de que não existe uma vantagem clara no reconhecimento emocional de faces para indivíduos com valores elevados no GoldMSI, estes resultados não mostraram a relação previamente identificada entre sofisticação musical e desempenho nas tarefas de reconhecimento de vozes (ver Correia et al., 2020). Por outro lado, a análise exploratória revelou uma correlação marginalmente significativa entre o Envolvimento Ativo (i.e., subescala do Gold-MSI) e o reconhecimento de medo. Houve uma correlação particularmente forte entre o reconhecimento do medo na tarefa da prosódia de discurso e o envolvimento ativo com a música que parece ter contribuído de forma decisiva para que a anterior estivesse mais saliente. Em suma, esta investigação propôs-se explorar correlações entre os dados da escala de autoavaliação Gold-MSI e as médias da precisão de resposta (corrigida quanto a potenciais enviesamentos) em três tarefas de reconhecimento emocional variando apenas no que toca ao estímulo usado. Os resultados não mostraram melhorias de desempenho nos indivíduos que pontuaram tendencialmente mais alto no Gold-MSI, tanto para as tarefas de voz como para a de faces. Poderá ser importante no futuro utilizar métodos complementares para se compreender as variáveis de interesse e as relações entre elas de forma extensiva. Por exemplo, técnicas de EEG poderão ajudar a descrever o decurso temporal do processamento emocional para cada tipo de estímulo, enquanto que as de fMRI poderão localizar as regiões ativas durante o reconhecimento emocional e como esses padrões de conectividade variam de acordo com o tipo de emoção. Posto isto, defendemos que este estudo tem relevância na literatura da sofisticação musical

Common Premotor Regions for the Perception and Production of Prosody and Correlations with Empathy and Prosodic Ability

Background: Prosody, the melody and intonation of speech, involves the rhythm, rate, pitch and voice quality to relay linguistic and emotional information from one individual to another. A significant component of human social communication depends upon interpreting and responding to another person’s prosodic tone as well as one’s own ability to produce prosodic speech. However there has been little work on whether the perception and production of prosody share common neural processes, and if so, how these might correlate with individual differences in social ability. Methods: The aim of the present study was to determine the degree to which perception and production of prosody rely on shared neural systems. Using fMRI, neural activity during perception and production of a meaningless phrase in different prosodic intonations was measured. Regions of overlap for production and perception of prosody were found in premotor regions, in particular the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Activity in these regions was further found to correlate with how high an individual scored on two different measures of affective empathy as well as a measure on prosodic production ability. Conclusions: These data indicate, for the first time, that areas that are important for prosody production may also be utilized for prosody perception, as well as other aspects of social communication and social understanding, such as aspect

Psychometric Properties of a Multichannel Battery for the Assessment of Emotional Perception

Perceiving the emotions of others is an important, even critical, skill for success in social interactions. The lack of this skill has been associated with decreased social competence and poor interpersonal relationships (Shimokawa et al., 2001). It frequently co-occurs with psychopathology. Furthermore, there is a large and rapidly growing literature examining the neural substrates of emotional processing. Studies have examined the processing of particular emotions, as well as how emotions conveyed through different modalities are processed. The New York Emotion Battery (NYEB; Borod, Welkowitz, & Obler, 1992) includes tests for the perception of eight discrete emotions across three communication channels: facial, prosodic, and lexical. The NYEB has been used to study psychiatric and neurological conditions, as well as normal aging. For the current study, data were collected from 122 healthy, right-handed adults, ages 20-89. Participants completed emotion perception and nonemotional control tasks from the NYEB. Perceptual tasks included both identification and discrimination of emotion. All participants completed a screening battery which included measures of cognitive, perceptual, and affective functioning. The aims of the current study were: 1) To establish the internal consistency reliability and construct validity of the NYEB. 2) To examine the structure of its observed and latent variables and compare those structures to theory. 3) To describe any demographic or response biases of the NYEB. Results indicated that the NYEB has very good internal consistency for identification tasks, but lower internal consistency for discrimination tasks. Performance on the NYEB (both overall and in its identification subtests) is strongly determined by a general factor of emotion perception ability. Individual identification subtests often display a moderately strong second factor, but are still good measures of general emotional perception ability. Analysis of hierarchical grouping of the battery\u27s emotions provides support for the approach/withdrawal classification of emotions (as it relates to perceived emotions). Individual emotions varied in how accurately they were perceived and how frequently they were named in responses. Overall, the NYEB has good psychometric properties, should be a valid and useful instrument for assessing emotion perception deficits in psychopathology, and has potential to be adapted into an abbreviated form

Dealing with Feelings: Characterization of Trait Alexithymia on Emotion Regulation Strategies and Cognitive-Emotional Processing

Background: Alexithymia, or "no words for feelings'', is a personality trait which is associated with difficulties in emotion recognition and regulation. It is unknown whether this deficit is due primarily to regulation, perception, or mentalizing of emotions. In order to shed light on the core deficit, we tested our subjects on a wide range of emotional tasks. We expected the high alexithymics to underperform on all tasks. Method: Two groups of healthy individuals, high and low scoring on the cognitive component of the Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire, completed questionnaires of emotion regulation and performed several emotion processing tasks including a micro expression recognition task, recognition of emotional prosody and semantics in spoken sentences, an emotional and identity learning task and a conflicting beliefs and emotions task (emotional mentalizing). Results: The two groups differed on the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire and Empathy Quotient. Specifically, the Emotion Regulation Quotient showed that alexithymic individuals used more suppressive and less reappraisal strategies. On the behavioral tasks, as expected, alexithymics performed worse on recognition of micro expressions and emotional mentalizing. Surprisingly, groups did not differ on tasks of emotional semantics and prosody and associative emotional-learning. Conclusion: Individuals scoring high on the cognitive component of alexithymia are more prone to suppressive emotion regulation strategies rather than reappraisal strategies. Regarding emotional information processing, alexithymia is associated with reduced performance on measures of early processing as well as higher order mentalizing. However, difficulties in the processing of emotional language were not a core deficit in our alexithymic group

Examining Relationships Between Basic Emotion Perception and Musical Training in the Prosodic, Facial, and Lexical Channels of Communication and in Music

Research has suggested that intensive musical training may result in transfer effects from musical to non-musical domains. There is considerable research on perceptual and cognitive transfer effects associated with music, but, comparatively, fewer studies examined relationships between musical training and emotion processing. Preliminary findings, though equivocal, suggested that musical training is associated with enhanced perception of emotional prosody, consistent with a growing body of research demonstrating relationships between music and speech. In addition, few studies directly examined the relationship between musical training and the perception of emotions expressed in music, and no studies directly evaluated this relationship in the facial and lexical channels of emotion communication. In an effort to expand on prior findings, the current study characterized emotion perception differences between musicians and non-musicians in the prosodic, lexical, and facial channels of communication and in music. A total of 119 healthy adults (18-40 years old) completed the study. Fifty-eight were musicians and 61 were controls. Participants were screened for neurological and psychiatric illness. They completed emotion perception tasks from the New York Emotion Battery (Borod, Welkowitz, & Obler, 1992) and a music emotion perception task, created for this project, using stimuli developed by Eerola and Vuoskoski (2011). They also completed multiple non-emotional control measures, as well as neuropsychological and self-report measures, in order to control for any relevant participant group differences. Parametric and non-parametric statistical procedures were employed to evaluate for group differences in emotion perception accuracy for each of the emotional control tasks. Parametric and non-parametric procedures were also used to evaluate whether musicians and non-musicians differed with regard to their perception of basic emotions. There was evidence for differences in emotion perception between musicians and non- musicians. Musicians were more accurate than non-musicians for the prosodic channel and for musical emotions. There were no group differences for the lexical or facial channels of emotion communication. When error patterns were examined, musicians and non-musicians were found to make similar patterns of misidentifications, suggesting that musicians and non-musicians were processing emotions similarly. Results are discussed in the context of theories of music and speech, emotion perception processing, and learning transfer. This work serves to clarify and strengthen prior research demonstrating relationships between music and speech. It also has implications for understanding emotion perception as well as potential clinical implications, particularly for neurorehabilitation. Lastly, this work serves to guide future research on music and emotion processing