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Abstract:
It is well established that lesions of the human orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) lead to large-scale changes in emotional behaviour. For example, it has been shown that patients with orbitofrontal lesions have impaired emotional face and voice expression recognition (e.g. Hornak et al., 1996; 2003). However, to our knowledge, previous studies have failed to acknowledge that emotional perception is a multi-level process, i.e. studies have not investigated different stages of emotional processing (early vs. late) in the same patient group. Therefore, the current study investigated emotional prosody processing in an on-line ERP-experiment (using an implicit emotional prosody processing task) and an offline behavioural experiment (using an explicit emotional prosody processing task). We tested emotional prosody perception in OFC-lesion patients using vocal expressions (with and without lexical content) of anger, fear, disgust and happiness compared to a neutral baseline. In line with previous evidence (Paulmann & Kotz, 2005), results show that early emotional prosody processing of different emotional prosodies elicit a similar P200 in the ERP in both OFC-patients and healthy controls. However, at later processing stages, i.e. decision and evaluation stages, healthy listeners show better emotional prosody recognition rates than OFC-patients. The current data serve as first preliminary evidence that emotional prosody perception is impaired only at later processing stages in OFC-patients.
