Jiang Jessica, Johnson Jeremy C S, Requena-Komuro Maï-Carmen, Benhamou Elia, Sivasathiaseelan Harri, Chokesuwattanaskul Anthipa, Nelson Annabel, Nortley Ross, Weil Rimona S, Volkmer Anna, Marshall Charles R, Bamiou Doris-Eva, Warren Jason D, Hardy Chris J D
Dementia Research Centre, Department of Neurodegenerative Disease, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, 1st Floor, 8-11 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR, UK.
Basic and Clinical Neuroscience, School of Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK.
Sci Rep. 2024 Dec 28;14(1):31332. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-82694-z.
Previous research suggests that emotional prosody perception is impaired in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease (AD) and primary progressive aphasia (PPA). However, no previous research has investigated emotional prosody perception in these diseases under non-ideal listening conditions. We recruited 18 patients with AD, and 31 with PPA (nine logopenic (lvPPA); 11 nonfluent/agrammatic (nfvPPA) and 11 semantic (svPPA)), together with 24 healthy age-matched individuals. Participants listened to speech stimuli conveying three emotions in clear and noise-vocoded forms and had to identify the emotion being conveyed. We then conducted correlation analyses between task performance and measures of socio-emotional functioning. All patient groups showed significant impairments in identifying clear emotional prosody compared to healthy individuals. These deficits were exacerbated under noise-vocoded conditions, with all patient groups performing significantly worse than healthy individuals and patients with lvPPA performing significantly worse than those with svPPA. Significant correlations with social cognition measures were observed more consistently for noise-vocoded than clear emotional prosody comprehension. These findings open a window on a dimension of real-world emotional communication that has often been overlooked in dementia, with particular relevance to social cognition, and begin to suggest a novel candidate paradigm for investigating and quantifying this systematically.
先前的研究表明，在诸如阿尔茨海默病（AD）和原发性进行性失语症（PPA）等神经退行性疾病中，情感韵律感知受损。然而，以前没有研究在非理想听力条件下调查这些疾病中的情感韵律感知。我们招募了18名AD患者和31名PPA患者（9名音韵性原发性进行性失语症（lvPPA）患者；11名非流利/语法缺失型（nfvPPA）患者和11名语义型（svPPA）患者），以及24名年龄匹配的健康个体。参与者收听以清晰和噪声编码形式传达三种情感的语音刺激，并必须识别所传达的情感。然后，我们对任务表现与社会情感功能测量之间进行了相关性分析。与健康个体相比，所有患者组在识别清晰的情感韵律方面均表现出显著受损。在噪声编码条件下，这些缺陷更加严重，所有患者组的表现均显著差于健康个体，且lvPPA患者的表现显著差于svPPA患者。与社会认知测量的显著相关性在噪声编码的情感韵律理解方面比清晰的情感韵律理解方面更为一致地观察到。这些发现为痴呆症中常常被忽视的现实世界情感交流维度打开了一扇窗，这与社会认知特别相关，并开始提出一种用于系统地研究和量化这一维度的新候选范式。
