Investigation of receptive affective prosodic ability in school-aged boys with and without depression

Objective: To investigate the accuracy of affective prosodic speech identif ication of 38 right-handed school-aged buys, half of whom had been classifi ed as having depression and the other half as not having depression. Backgr ound: There is support in the literature for relative right posterior hemis phere dysfunction in patients with depression. The Literature also suggests that patients with depression may have difficulty processing receptive aff ective prosodic speech. Less is known, however, regarding the neuropsycholo gy of depression in children. It was hypothesized that children with depres sion would demonstrate decreased ability in the identification of affective prosody. Method: Participants were asked to identify happy, angry, sad, an d neutral prosodies within congruent and incongruent verbal statements. Res ults: As predicted, the ability of boys with depression to identify congrue nt and incongruent affective prosody was significantly lower compared with boys without depression. Conclusion: The results of this experiment are dis cussed in terms of a right-hemisphere dysfunction model for depression in c hildhood.