Brain and Psychological Sciences Research Centre, Swinburne University, Melbourne, VIC 3122, Australia; Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre, Central Clinical School, Monash University and The Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, VIC 3004, Australia.
J Affect Disord. 2013 Dec;151(3):1102-7. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2013.08.039. Epub 2013 Sep 12.
Accurate emotion processing is critical to understanding the social world. Despite growing evidence of facial emotion processing impairments in patients with bipolar disorder (BD), comprehensive investigations of emotional prosodic processing is limited. The existing (albeit sparse) literature is inconsistent at best, and confounded by failures to control for the effects of gender or low level sensory-perceptual impairments. The present study sought to address this paucity of research by utilizing a novel behavioural battery to comprehensively investigate the auditory-prosodic profile of BD.
Fifty BD patients and 52 healthy controls completed tasks assessing emotional and linguistic prosody, and sensitivity for discriminating tones that deviate in amplitude, duration and pitch.
BD patients were less sensitive than their control counterparts in discriminating amplitude and durational cues but not pitch cues or linguistic prosody. They also demonstrated impaired ability to recognize happy intonations; although this was specific to male's with the disorder. The recognition of happy in the patient group was correlated with pitch and amplitude sensitivity in female patients only.
The small sample size of patients after stratification by current mood state prevented us from conducting subgroup comparisons between symptomatic, euthymic and control participants to explicitly examine the effects of mood.
Our findings indicate the existence of a female advantage for the processing of emotional prosody in BD, specifically for the processing of happy. Although male BD patients were impaired in their ability to recognize happy prosody, this was unrelated to reduced tone discrimination sensitivity. This study indicates the importance of examining both gender and low order sensory perceptual capacity when examining emotional prosody.
准确的情绪处理对于理解社会世界至关重要。尽管越来越多的证据表明双相情感障碍（BD）患者存在面部情绪处理障碍，但对情绪韵律处理的综合研究仍然有限。现有（尽管很少）文献最多只是不一致的，并且由于未能控制性别或低水平感觉-知觉障碍的影响而受到混淆。本研究旨在通过利用新的行为电池来全面研究 BD 的听觉韵律特征来解决这一研究不足的问题。
50 名 BD 患者和 52 名健康对照者完成了评估情绪和语言韵律以及辨别幅度、持续时间和音高偏差的音调的任务。
BD 患者在辨别幅度和持续时间线索方面的敏感性低于对照组，但在辨别音高线索或语言韵律方面则没有。他们也表现出识别快乐语调的能力受损；尽管这仅针对患有该疾病的男性。患者组对快乐的识别与女性患者的音高和幅度敏感性相关。
按当前情绪状态分层后患者的样本量较小，这阻止了我们对有症状、稳定期和对照组参与者进行亚组比较，以明确检查情绪的影响。
我们的研究结果表明，在 BD 中存在女性对情绪韵律处理的优势，特别是对快乐处理的优势。尽管男性 BD 患者在识别快乐韵律的能力受损，但这与降低音调辨别敏感性无关。这项研究表明，在检查情绪韵律时，检查性别和低水平感觉-知觉能力非常重要。
