Dynamic emotion processing in Parkinson's disease as a function of channel availability

Parkinson's disease (PD) is linked to impairments for recognizing emotional expressions, although the extent and nature of these communication deficits are uncertain. Here, we compared how adults with and without PD recognize dynamic expressions of emotion in three channels, involving lexical-semantic, prosody, and/or facial cues (each channel was investigated individually and in combination). Results indicated that while emotion recognition increased with channel availability in the PD group, patients performed significantly worse than healthy participants in all conditions. Difficulties processing dynamic emotional stimuli in PD could be linked to striatal dysfunction, which reduces efficient binding of sequential information in the disease. © 2010 Psychology Press.