Recognition of emotions from visual and prosodic cues in Parkinson's disease

To assess whether Parkinson Disease (PD) patients are impaired at perceiving emotions from facial and prosodic cues and whether any putative defective performance concerns recognition of a particular emotion.

Braak et al. [1] demonstrated that in different stages PD pathology involves the nigrostriatal system, the amygdala, and the insular cortex. Discrete brain lesions to these structures can cause selective deficits in recognising facial and prosodic stimuli expressing particular emotions. However, the investigation of facial and prosodic emotional processing in PD patients has lead to conflicting results.

We compared 27 cognitively unimpaired PD patients with control subjects by means of the Facial Emotion Recognition Battery and the Emotional Prosody Recognition Battery.

PD patients were impaired in recognising, selecting, and matching facial affects. In particular, the Facial Emotion Recognition Battery demonstrated a severe impairment in recognising sad and fearful faces. In the Emotional Prosody Recognition Battery PD patients demonstrated a diffuse impairment, including the recognition of emotional and propositional prosody.

Face emotion processing is impaired in PD patients, with a disproportionate deficit involving fear and sadness. The pattern of face expression processing impairment in PD patients might depend on the regional distribution of the pathology. The widespread involvement of both emotional and propositional prosodic processing parallels the aprosodic characteristics of Parkinsonian speech production.