Research Report Vocal emotion processing in Parkinson's disease: Reduced sensitivity to negative emotions Chinar Dara, Laura Monetta, Marc D. Pell ⁎ School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, Montréal, Qc, Canada ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history: Accepted 16 October 2007 Available online 22 October 2007 To document the impact of Parkinson's disease (PD) on communication and to further clarify the role of the basal ganglia in the processing of emotional speech prosody, this investigation compared how PD patients identify basic emotions from prosody and judge specific affective properties of the same vocal stimuli, such as valence or intensity. Sixteen non-demented adults with PD and 17 healthy control (HC) participants listened to semantically-anomalous pseudo-utterances spoken in seven emotional intonations (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness, pleasant surprise, neutral) and two distinct levels of perceived emotional intensity (high, low). On three separate occasions, participants classified the emotional meaning of the prosody for each utterance (identification task), rated how positive or negative the stimulus sounded (valence rating task), or rated how intense the emotion was expressed by the speaker (intensity rating task). Results indicated that the PD group was significantly impaired relative to the HC group for categorizing emotional prosody and showed a reduced sensitivity to valence, but not intensity, attributes of emotional expressions conveying anger, disgust, and fear. The findings are discussed in light of the possible role of the basal ganglia in the processing of discrete emotions, particularly those associated with negative vigilance, and of how PD may impact on the sequential processing of prosodic expressions. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Prosody Basal ganglia Affect Pragmatic Speech perception 1. Introduction In speech communication, listeners attend to relative changes in pitch, duration, and loudness, or speech prosody, to infer the emotions or affective state of a speaker (Banse and Scherer, 1996; Scherer, 1986). Recent interest in the neurocognitive processing of emotions from a speaker's voice indicates that these abilities are governed by a distributed neural network involving cortical and subcortical structures (Pell, 2006; Schirmer and Kotz, 2006). For example, many reports have sought to elaborate the role of cortical regions, such as right temporal and bilateral prefrontal areas, at different stages of processing emotional prosody (Beaucousin et al., 2007; Wildgruber et al., 2005a,b). Recent studies have also drawn attention to the involvement of subcortical structures in vocal emotion processing, such as the amygdala (Sander et al., 2005; Scott et al., 1997) and especially the basal BRAIN RESEARCH 1188 (2008) 100 – 111 ⁎ Corresponding author. McGill University, Faculty of Medicine, School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, 1266, avenue des Pins Ouest, Montreal, Qc, Canada H3G 1A8. Fax: +1 514 398 8123. E-mail address: marc.pell@mcgill.ca (M.D. Pell). URL: http://www.mcgill.ca/pell_lab/ (M.D. Pell). 0006-8993/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2007.10.034 available at www.sciencedirect.com www.elsevier.com/locate/brainres