Dataset Information

Impaired socio-emotional processing in a developmental music disorder.

ABSTRACT: Some individuals show a congenital deficit for music processing despite normal peripheral auditory processing, cognitive functioning, and music exposure. This condition, termed congenital amusia, is typically approached regarding its profile of musical and pitch difficulties. Here, we examine whether amusia also affects socio-emotional processing, probing auditory and visual domains. Thirteen adults with amusia and 11 controls completed two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants judged emotions in emotional speech prosody, nonverbal vocalizations (e.g., crying), and (silent) facial expressions. Target emotions were: amusement, anger, disgust, fear, pleasure, relief, and sadness. Compared to controls, amusics were impaired for all stimulus types, and the magnitude of their impairment was similar for auditory and visual emotions. In Experiment 2, participants listened to spontaneous and posed laughs, and either inferred the authenticity of the speaker's state, or judged how much laughs were contagious. Amusics showed decreased sensitivity to laughter authenticity, but normal contagion responses. Across the experiments, mixed-effects models revealed that the acoustic features of vocal signals predicted socio-emotional evaluations in both groups, but the profile of predictive acoustic features was different in amusia. These findings suggest that a developmental music disorder can affect socio-emotional cognition in subtle ways, an impairment not restricted to auditory information.

SUBMITTER: Lima CF

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5057155 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Impaired socio-emotional processing in a developmental music disorder.

Lima César F CF Brancatisano Olivia O Fancourt Amy A Müllensiefen Daniel D Scott Sophie K SK Warren Jason D JD Stewart Lauren L

Scientific reports 20161011

Some individuals show a congenital deficit for music processing despite normal peripheral auditory processing, cognitive functioning, and music exposure. This condition, termed congenital amusia, is typically approached regarding its profile of musical and pitch difficulties. Here, we examine whether amusia also affects socio-emotional processing, probing auditory and visual domains. Thirteen adults with amusia and 11 controls completed two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants judged emoti ...[more]

PMID: 27725686

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Project description:In a society where mobility, globalization and contact with people from other cultures have become its distinctive traits, the enhancement of plurilingualism and intercultural understanding should be of the utmost concern. From a positive psychology perspective, agency is the human capacity to affect other people positively or negatively through one's actions. This agentic vision can be related to mediation, a concept rooted in socio-cultural learning theory, where social interaction is considered a fundamental cornerstone in the development of cognition. These social interactions in the language learning setting may be facilitated through musical activities due to their social bonding effect. This paper tries to offer insights into how a music-mediated experience in language learning may develop students' interpersonal and collaborative competences to become active members of a more inclusive society. Mediation, considered to be a paradigm shift in the foreign language classroom and for different out-of-class language learning possibilities, could also provide an environment where learners maximize their emotional intelligence. Our paper focuses on this paradigm shift spearheaded by the Common European Framework for Languages Companion Volume (CEFR/CV) and the considerable repercussions it is bound to have for foreign language didactics, as cooperative tasks become central to foreign language learning. We hypothesize that mediated language learning experiences (MeLLEs) imply a socio-emotional change in learners, focusing on the others, on their needs and interests, by trying to help them understand texts, concepts or facilitating communication with their peers. An intervention with a music-MeLLE was designed and implemented in an L2 classroom of adult learners with divergent backgrounds. A self-assessment scale with mediation descriptors and the socio-emotional expertise scale (SEE) were administered. Results show that students become more mindful of their strengths, and of their capacity for collaboration and teamwork. This leads to more awareness of their mediation skills. Students' mediation skills correlate significantly with their socio-emotional skills - specifically with their expressivity. The implementation of a music-mediated experience also promoted tolerance and enhanced learners' intrinsic motivations for language learning at the same time as acknowledging their diversity.

Project description:Laughter is a fundamental communicative signal in our relations with other people and is used to convey a diverse repertoire of social and emotional information. It is therefore potentially a useful probe of impaired socio-emotional signal processing in neurodegenerative diseases. Here we investigated the cognitive and affective processing of laughter in forty-seven patients representing all major syndromes of frontotemporal dementia, a disease spectrum characterised by severe socio-emotional dysfunction (twenty-two with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, twelve with semantic variant primary progressive aphasia, thirteen with nonfluent-agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia), in relation to fifteen patients with typical amnestic Alzheimer's disease and twenty healthy age-matched individuals. We assessed cognitive labelling (identification) and valence rating (affective evaluation) of samples of spontaneous (mirthful and hostile) and volitional (posed) laughter versus two auditory control conditions (a synthetic laughter-like stimulus and spoken numbers). Neuroanatomical associations of laughter processing were assessed using voxel-based morphometry of patients' brain MR images. While all dementia syndromes were associated with impaired identification of laughter subtypes relative to healthy controls, this was significantly more severe overall in frontotemporal dementia than in Alzheimer's disease and particularly in the behavioural and semantic variants, which also showed abnormal affective evaluation of laughter. Over the patient cohort, laughter identification accuracy was correlated with measures of daily-life socio-emotional functioning. Certain striking syndromic signatures emerged, including enhanced liking for hostile laughter in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, impaired processing of synthetic laughter in the nonfluent-agrammatic variant (consistent with a generic complex auditory perceptual deficit) and enhanced liking for numbers ('numerophilia') in the semantic variant. Across the patient cohort, overall laughter identification accuracy correlated with regional grey matter in a core network encompassing inferior frontal and cingulo-insular cortices; and more specific correlates of laughter identification accuracy were delineated in cortical regions mediating affective disambiguation (identification of hostile and posed laughter in orbitofrontal cortex) and authenticity (social intent) decoding (identification of mirthful and posed laughter in anteromedial prefrontal cortex) (all p < .05 after correction for multiple voxel-wise comparisons over the whole brain). These findings reveal a rich diversity of cognitive and affective laughter phenotypes in canonical dementia syndromes and suggest that laughter is an informative probe of neural mechanisms underpinning socio-emotional dysfunction in neurodegenerative disease.

Dataset Information

Impaired socio-emotional processing in a developmental music disorder.

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Impaired socio-emotional processing in a developmental music disorder.

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