Exploring the Role of Depression in Emotional Prosody Recognition Deficits
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Date
2025-03
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Abstract
Research suggests that those with depression may have difficulty in recognizing the emotions of others. These studies have examined this relationship using only facial expressions as stimuli to convey emotion. The current study examines how individuals with depression symptoms are able to recognize emotions by the prosody of speech. It was expected that the relationship would align with past research. Participants first completed a task in which they had to identify the emotions they heard in prerecorded, semantically neutral sentences. The emotions used included joy, sadness, anger, surprise, and neutral. Next, participants completed the PHQ-9, a tool used to assess depression symptoms. To assess the strength and direction of the linear relationship between PHQ-9 score and accuracy on the emotion identification task, a Pearson correlation analysis was conducted. Consistent with past studies, there was a statistically significant negative correlation between depression symptoms and accuracy on the prosody task. Participants who scored higher on the PHQ-9 had lower accuracy on the emotion identification task. This result suggests that depressed individuals exhibit a similar emotion recognition deficit for speech prosody as for facial expressions. However, these findings only reflect the existence of a general deficit in prosodic emotion recognition. Further research should explore potential impacts of this deficit, as well as the interaction between prosody and facial expressions.
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Human Experience (The Ohio State University Denman Undergraduate Research Forum)
Keywords
Psychology, Emotion, Cognitive psychology, Language perception, Depression