Mechanism Of Preattentive Processing Of Emotional Prosody Among Patients With Panic Disorder: A Mismatch Negativity Study

Experiment 1 Mechanism of preattentive processing of emotional prosody: A mismatch negativity studyObjective: Voice-recognition is one of cognitive activities,which plays an important role for human in social relationship. The emotional content of speech can often determine and influence human communion.Learning more about the mechanism of preattentive processing of emotional prosody has a significant value. In this study, we investigate the mechanism of preattentive automatic processing of emotional prosody by event-related potentials(ERPs).Methods: 16 healthy subjects (5 male/11 Female, mean age 40.62±10.79 years, educational level 13.75±4.33 years) recruited from the First Affiliated Hospital of Dalian Medical University were slected for the study. In this study, the Reverse-oddball paradigm,in which the standard and deviant stimuli are of the same physical attributes, were selected. Stimulus sequence were presented by the E-Prime software, and types of emotional prosody such as happy, angry and neutral without semantic were pronounced by a women.The duration or intensity of voice were equal. The subjects were instructed to watch a silent movie and ignore the voice delivering over headphones.Sixty-four channels electroencephalogram(EEG) were recorded by Neuroscan SynAmps2 System. After off-line analysis, the mean amplitude of emotional MMN were analyzed using repeated measures analysis (Repeated measure ANOVA).Results:1.There was a significant main effect of hemisphere(F_(2,30)=6.207,p<0.05).The difference between left hemisphere and the middle one is significant(p<0.05),the same as the right and the middle one.2.There was a significant main effect of region(F_(1,15)=59.821,p<0.05),and the frontal head amplifier (-0.803±0.271μV )larger than the occipital one(0.078±0.241μV);Conclusion:1. Emotional prosody elicit emotion-related MMN in preattentive automatic processing.2. The emotional effect of prosody is significant at right hemisphere and the frontal head.Experiment 2 Mechanism of preattentive processing of emotional prosody among patients with panic disorder:A mismatch negativity studyObjective: Panic disorder (PD) is a common mental disease characterized by recurrent, sudden onset, unpredictable, intense horror experience and other symptoms. Trigger and maintainence of the psychological and physiological mechanisms of PD have not been fully elucidated.This study amied to investigate the mechanism of preattentive processing of emotional prosody among patients with panic disorder.Methods: 15 patients with PD(5male/10female,mean age 45.13±8.98 years)and 16 age- and sex- matched healthy volunteers during the same period were recruited in this study. The scores of HAMA (14-item Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale ,HAMA) of all subjects and PDSS (Panic Disorder Severity Scale, PDSS) of all patients were assessed; All subjects were interviewed by SCID(Structured clinical Interview for the Diagnositic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4^th edition.Patient Edition, SCID).Other methods were the same as the experiment 1.Results:1.There was no significant main effect of mean amplitudes(F_(1,29)=0.396,p=0.534)and of peak latency (F_(1,29)=0.081,p=0.778)between two group.2. Emotional MMN amplitude and HAMA, PDSS score had no correlation (P_s> 0.05).Conclusion: Panic disorder patients did not show dysfunction of preattentive processing of emotional prosody in Reverse-oddball paradigm.