Article

The Aprosodia Battery was developed to distinguish different patterns of
affective-prosodic deficits in patients with left versus right brain damage by
using affective utterances with incrementally reduced verbal-articulatory
demands. It has also been used to assess affective-prosodic performance in
various clinical groups, including patients with schizophrenia, PTSD, multiple
sclerosis, alcohol abuse and Alzheimer disease and in healthy adults, as means to
explore maturational-aging effects. To date, all studies using the Aprosodia
Battery have yielded statistically robust results. This paper describes an
extensive, quantitative error analysis using previous results from the Aprosodia
Battery in patients with left and right brain damage, age-equivalent controls
(old adults), and a group of young adults. This inductive analysis was performed
to address three major issues in the literature: (1) sex and (2)
maturational-aging effects in comprehending affective prosody and (3)
differential hemispheric lateralization of emotions. We found no overall sex
effects for comprehension of affective prosody. There were, however, scattered
sex effects related to a particular affect, suggesting that these differences
were related to cognitive appraisal rather than primary perception. Results in
the brain damaged groups did not support the Valence Hypothesis of emotional
lateralization but did support the Right Hemisphere Hypothesis of emotional
lateralization. When comparing young versus old adults, a robust
maturational-aging effect was observed in overall error rates and in the
distribution of errors across affects. This effect appears to be mediated, in
part, by cognitive appraisal, causing an alteration in the salience of different
affective-prosodic stimuli with increasing age. In addition, the
maturational-aging effects lend support for the Emotion-Type hypothesis of
emotional lateralization and the "classic aging effect" that is due primarily to
decline of right hemisphere cognitive functions in senescence. The results of our
inductive analysis may help direct future deductive research efforts, exploring
the neuropsychology of emotional communication, by taking into account the
potentially confounding influence of (1) methodological differences involving
construction of test stimuli and assessment procedures, (2) developmental,
maturational and aging effects related to cognitive appraisal and (3) whether a
stimulus has a primary or social-emotional bias.
CI - Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Langue : ANGLAIS