BACKGROUND Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by difficulties in the cognitive processing of emotions (cognitive dimension) and in the experience of emotions (affective dimension). Previous research focused mainly on visual emotional processing in the cognitive alexithymia dimension. We investigated the impact of both alexithymia dimensions on electrophysiological responses to emo...

During acoustic communication in humans, information about a speaker's emotional state is predominantly conveyed by modulation of the tone of voice (emotional or affective prosody). Based on lesion data, a right hemisphere superiority for cerebral processing of emotional prosody has been assumed. However, the available clinical studies do not yet provide a coherent picture with respect to inter...

A hearer's perception of an utterance as sarcastic depends on integration of the heard statement, the discourse context, and the prosody of the utterance, as well as evaluation of the incongruity among these aspects. The effect of prosody in sarcasm comprehension is evident in everyday conversation, but little is known about its underlying mechanism or neural substrates. To elucidate the neural...

Background Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) exhibit deficits in recognizing and expressing vocal emotional prosody. The aim of this study was to explore emotional prosody processing in patients with PD shortly after subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS). Methods Two groups of patients with PD (pre-DBS and post-DBS) and one healthy control (HC) group were recruited as pa...

During acoustic communication among human beings, emotional information can be expressed both by the propositional content of verbal utterances and by the modulation of speech melody (affective prosody). It is well established that linguistic processing is bound predominantly to the left hemisphere of the brain. By contrast, the encoding of emotional intonation has been assumed to depend specif...