Decoding emotional prosody in Parkinson’s disease and its potential neuropsychological basis.

Parkinson’s disease patients may have difficulty decoding prosodic emotion cues. These data suggest the basal ganglia are involved, but may reflect dorsolateral prefrontal cortex dysfunction. An auditory emotional N-back task and cognitive N-back task were administered to 33 patients and 33 older adult controls, as were an auditory emotional Stroop task and cognitive Stroop task. No deficit was observed on the emotion decoding tasks; this did not alter with increased frontal lobe load. However, on the cognitive tasks, patients performed worse than older adult controls, suggesting cognitive deficits may be more prominent. The impact of frontal lobe dysfunction on prosodic emotion cue decoding may only become apparent once frontal lobe pathology rises above a threshold