Not all sounds sound the same: Parkinson's disease affects differently emotion processing in music and in speech prosody

Does emotion processing in music and speech prosody recruit common neurocognitive mechanisms? To examine this question, we implemented a cross-domain comparative design in Parkinson's disease(PD). Twenty-four patients and 25 controls performed emotion recognition tasks for music and spoken sentences. In music, patients had impaired recognition of happiness and peacefulness, and intact recognition of sadness and fear; this pattern was independent of general cognitive and perceptual abilities. In speech, patients had a small global impairment, which was significantly mediated by executive dysfunction. Hence, PD affected differently musical and prosodic emotions. This dissociation indicates that the mechanisms underlying the two domains are partly independent.