Affective prosody: What do comprehension errors tell us about hemispheric lateralization of emotions, sex and aging effects, and the role of cognitive appraisal

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.