Emotional conversations in Parkinson's disease

Objective: To learn how PD influences verbal description of emotional event s. Background: Individuals with PD exhibit emotional processing deficits. E motional experience likely involves several dimensions (e.g., valence, arou sal, motor activation) subserved by a distributed modular network involving cortical, limbic, basal ganglia, diencephalic, and mesencephalic regions. Although the neurodegeneration in PD likely affects components in this netw ork, little is known about how PD influences emotional processing. Because PD is associated with activation deficits, one could predict that the disco urse of emotional experiences involving high activation would be reduced in patients with PD compared to control subjects. Alternatively, because pati ents with PD exhibit paradoxical sensitivity to externally evoked motor act ivation (kinesia paradoxical, it is possible that emotional stimuli may fac ilitate verbal emotional expression more so in patients with PD than in con trol subjects. Methods: The authors measured verbal descriptions of persona l emotional experiences in subjects with PD and normal controls. Results: C ompared with control subjects, individuals with PD showed a relative increa se in the number of words spoken and in discourse duration when talking abo ut emotional experiences that are usually associated with high levels of ar ousal and motor activation. Although the authors did not measure arousal or activation, prior research has shown that, when asked to recall an emotion al experience, people will often re-experience the emotion previously exper ienced during that episode. Conclusions: Recalling emotional episodes induc es verbal kinesia paradoxica in patients with PD. Although. recall of these emotional episodes may have been associated with increased arousal and act ivation, the mechanism underlying emotional verbal kinesia paradoxica is un clear.