Comprehension of affective prosody in veterans with chronic posttraumatic stress disorder

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is one of the few psychiatric conditions in which a subjective decrease in emotional range serves as a diagnostic criterion. In order to investigate whether veterans with chronic PTSD also experienced objective limitations in emotional perception, the authors administered the Aprosodia Battery to a group of 11 veterans with chronic PTSD, nine subjects with right hemisphere damage, seven subjects with left hemisphere damage, and 12 comparison subjects. The patients with PTSD displayed significant deficiencies in the comprehension and discriminative components of affective speech, similar in severity and performance profile on the Aprosodia Battery to the individuals with focal right hemisphere damage due to ischemic infarction.