title: Neural Processing of Emotional Prosody across the Adult Lifespan.
abstract: Emotion recognition deficits emerge with the increasing age, in particular, a decline in the identification of sadness. However, little is known about the age-related changes of emotion processing in sensory, affective, and executive brain areas. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated neural correlates of auditory processing of prosody across adult lifespan. Unattended detection of emotional prosody changes was assessed in 21 young (age range: 18-35 years), 19 middle-aged (age range: 36-55 years), and 15 older (age range: 56-75 years) adults. Pseudowords uttered with neutral prosody were standards in an oddball paradigm with angry, sad, happy, and gender deviants (total 20% deviants). Changes in emotional prosody and voice gender elicited bilateral superior temporal gyri (STG) responses reflecting automatic encoding of prosody. At the right STG, responses to sad deviants decreased linearly with age, whereas happy events exhibited a nonlinear relationship. In contrast to behavioral data, no age by sex interaction emerged on the neural networks. The aging decline of emotion processing of prosodic cues emerges already at an early automatic stage of information processing at the level of the auditory cortex. However, top-down modulation may lead to an additional perceptional bias, for example, towards positive stimuli, and may depend on context factors such as the listener's sex.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, University Hospital Aachen, RWTH Aachen, 52074 Aachen, Germany ; Clinical Affective Neuroimaging Laboratory, 39120 Magdeburg, Germany ; Department of Neurology, Otto von Guericke University of Magdeburg, 39120 Magdeburg, Germany ; Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, 39118 Magdeburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Liliana Ramona
authors.initials: LR
authors.lastname: Demenescu
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, University Hospital Aachen, RWTH Aachen, 52074 Aachen, Germany ; Tsutsuji Mental Hospital, Tatebayashi, Gunma Prefecture, Japan.
authors.forename: Yutaka
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Kato
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, University Hospital Aachen, RWTH Aachen, 52074 Aachen, Germany ; JARA-Translational Brain Medicine, 52074 Aachen, Germany.
authors.forename: Klaus
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mathiak
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009474:Neurons / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000473:pathology*; D011859:Radiography