Cerebellar contribution to vocal emotion decoding: Insights from stroke and neuroimaging

While the role of the cerebellum in emotion recognition has been explored with facial expressions, its involvement in the auditory modality (i.e., emotional prosody) remains to be demonstrated. The present study investigated the recognition of emotional prosody in 15 patients with chronic cerebellar ischaemic stroke and 15 matched healthy controls, using a validated task, as well as clinical, motor, neuropsychological, and psychiatric assessments. We explored the cerebellar lesion-behaviour relationship using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Results showed a significant difference between the stroke and healthy control groups, with patients giving erroneous ratings on the Surprise scale when they listened to fearful stimuli. Moreover, voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping revealed that these emotional misattributions correlated with lesions in right Lobules VIIb, VIIIa,b and IX. Interestingly, the posterior cerebellum has previously been found to be involved in affective processing, and Lobule VIIb in rhythm discrimination. These results point to the cerebellum's functional involvement in vocal emotion decoding.