Emotional Prosody

Did you know that the comprehension of emotional prosody is crucial for social functioning? According to researchers at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, this critical ability for recognizing, comprehending, or processing emotions appears to be compromised in various psychiatric disorders. For example, deficits for anger and sadness in schizophrenia, fear and surprise in bipolar affective disorder, and surprise in depression. Understanding that emotions do have their own brain-activity patterns may provide increased understanding of what happens in brains that have difficulty comprehending emotional prosody.