The problem of which cues, internal or external, permit a person to label and identify his own emotional state has been with us since the days that James (1890) first tendered his doctrine that \"the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion\" (p. 449). Since we are aware of a variety of feeling and emotion states, it should follow from James' proposition that the various emotions will be accompanied by a variety of differentiable bodily states. Following James' pronouncement, a formidable number of studies were undertaken in search of the physiological differentiators of the emotions. The results, in these early days, were almost uniformly negative. All of the emotional states experi-

"Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state": Erratum

tical perspective. For instance, there are only three passing references to kuru in a book of 650 pages. This edition reflects the renewed interest in the immunological theories of multiple sclerosis. More than half the text is devoted to Professor Lumsden's analysis of the pathoIogy and, in particular, the chemical pathology of the immune response. There is a great deal of original work devoted to the chemistry and behaviour of the immunoglobulins. Much of this appears in specialist journals and one must be grateful for the critical summary provided here. Professor Lumsden unequivocally sees the key to the problem of multiple sclerosis in the study of its immunochemistry, relegating infection by a virus or a slow virus to a quite subsidiary role. The clinical studies drawing on wide practical experience help to get one's prejudices about the illness onto a more reasoned footing. The section on treatment is still sadly limited. Dr. McAlpine found little to add to the regime which he described in 1955. McAlpine, Lumsden, and Acheson's reappraisal is an essential reference for the practising neurologist and the new edition makes important modification of and changes in emphasis from the edition of 1965.

https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/jnnp/36/5/894.3.full.pdf

The assessment of aphasia and related disorders

A MUCH debated question is whether sex differences exist in the functional organization of the brain for language1–4. A long-held hypothesis posits that language functions are more likely to be highly lateralized in males and to be represented in both cerebral hemispheres in females5,6, but attempts to demonstrate this have been inconclusive7–17. Here we use echo-planar functional magnetic resonance imaging18–21 to study 38 right-handed subjects (19 males and 19 females) during orthographic (letter recognition), phonological (rhyme) and semantic (semantic category) tasks. During phonological tasks, brain activation in males is lateralized to the left inferior frontal gyrus regions; in females the pattern of activation is very different, engaging more diffuse neural systems that involve both the left and right inferior frontal gyrus. Our data provide clear evidence for a sex difference in the functional organization of the brain for language and indicate that these variations exist at the level of phonological processing.

Sex differences in the functional organization of the brain for language

Over the past three decades, insights into the role of the cerebellum in emotional processing have substantially increased. Indeed, methodological refinements in cerebellar lesion studies and major technological advancements in the field of neuroscience are in particular responsible to an exponential growth of knowledge on the topic. It is timely to review the available data and to critically evaluate the current status of the role of the cerebellum in emotion and related domains. The main aim of this article is to present an overview of current facts and ongoing debates relating to clinical, neuroimaging, and neurophysiological findings on the role of the cerebellum in key aspects of emotion. Experts in the field of cerebellar research discuss the range of cerebellar contributions to emotion in nine topics. Topics include the role of the cerebellum in perception and recognition, forwarding and encoding of emotional information, and the experience and regulation of emotional states in relation to motor, cognitive, and social behaviors. In addition, perspectives including cerebellar involvement in emotional learning, pain, emotional aspects of speech, and neuropsychiatric aspects of the cerebellum in mood disorders are briefly discussed. Results of this consensus paper illustrate how theory and empirical research have converged to produce a composite picture of brain topography, physiology, and function that establishes the role of the cerebellum in many aspects of emotional processing.

/pdf/consensus-paper-cerebellum-and-emotion-1du8q5s1yp.pdf

Consensus Paper: Cerebellum and Emotion

Most individuals in both developing and developed countries who experience mental illness do not receive psychological services. The dominant model of delivering services used in developed countries (individual therapy by a highly trained mental health professional) can provide effective (i.e., evidence-based) treatments but is greatly limited as a means of reaching the large swath of individuals in need. We highlight several models outside the mental health professions (e.g., public health, medicine, business) that are more affordable and accessible and can be scaled up to reach many individuals in need. These models include task shifting, disruptive innovations, interventions in everyday settings, best-buy interventions, lifestyle changes, and social media. We convey their key characteristics and how they have been or can be applied to mental health. We end by discussing challenges in applying the models, critical issues on which effective treatment delivery depends, and paths to make progress.

Novel Models for Delivering Mental Health Services and Reducing the Burdens of Mental Illness

Research on social robots is mainly comprised of research into algorithmic problems in order to expand a robot´s capabilities to improve communication with human beings. Also, a large body of research concentrates on the appearance, i.e. aesthetic form of social robots. However, only little reference to their definition is made. In this paper we argue that form, function, and context have to be taken systematically into account in order to develop a model to help us understand social robots. Therefore, we address the questions: What is a social robot, what are the interdisciplinary research aspects of social robotics, and how are these different aspects interlinked? In order to present a comprehensive and concise overview of the various aspects we present a framework for a definition towards social robots.

/pdf/understanding-social-robots-37la45u1c4.pdf

Understanding Social Robots

We conducted a two-part study that contributes to the discussion about cervical auscultation (CA) as a scientifically justifiable and medically useful tool to identify patients with a high risk of aspiration/penetration. We sought to determine (1) acoustic features that mark a deglutition act as dysphagic; (2) acoustic changes in healthy older deglutition profiles compared with those of younger adults; (3) the correctness and concordance of rater judgments based on CA; and (4) if education in CA improves individual reliability. The first part of the study focused on a comparison of the “swallow morphology” of dysphagic as opposed to healthy subjects’ deglutition in terms of structure properties of the pharyngeal phase of deglutition. We obtained the following results. The duration of deglutition apnea is significantly higher in the older group than in the younger one. Comparing the younger group and the dysphagic group we found significant differences in duration of deglutition apnea, onset time, and number of gulps. Just one parameter, number of gulps, distinguishes significantly between the older and the dysphagic groups. The second part of the study aimed at evaluating the reliability of CA in detecting dysphagia measured as the concordance and the correctness of CA experts in classifying swallowing sounds. The interrater reliability coefficient AC1 resulted in a value of 0.46, which is to be interpreted as fair agreement. Furthermore, we found that comparison with radiologically defined aspiration/penetration for the group of experts (speech and language therapists) yielded 70% specificity and 94% sensitivity. We conclude that the swallowing sounds contain audible cues that should, in principle, permit reliable classification and view CA as an early warning system for identifying patients with a high risk of aspiration/penetration; however, it is not appropriate as a stand-alone tool.

Reliability and Validity of Cervical Auscultation

The objective of the study was to find out whether there is a connection between the perception of linguistic intonation contours and emotional intonation. Twenty-four subjects were asked to identify and discriminate emotional prosody listening to subtests 8A and 8B of the Tubinger Affect Battery as well as to 36 utterances that differed in linguistic intonation contour and were first presented normally and then low-pass-filtered. The subjects were divided into an older and a younger group in order to detect a possible age effect. The results showed that the ability to recognize and identify emotional prosody did not decline with age. These results are in contrast to the linguistic intonation contours, for which performance typically declined with age. Also, the low-pass-filtered utterances are more difficult to identify if the intonation contour is not salient, as in imperatives. Finally, the results do not show a gender difference. In sum the results indicate that emotional prosody and the reception of linguistic intonation contours seem to be processed by the same or similar brain structures.

Emotional and linguistic perception of prosody. Reception of prosody.

The appreciation of the meaning of a spoken message is dependent on the intact function of the left, i.e. dominant, hemisphere. As can be learned from aphasia, especially global and Wernicke’s aphasia, various aspects of language comprehension may be impaired by damage to the left temporal lobe, as has recently been shown anew by functional neuroimaging [1]. In a former study [2, 3], we were able to show that there may be a dissociation between form and content for written language, since patients suffering from left hemisphere pathology––although not properly able to read or understand script––could usually identify the author of a handwritten message whereas the opposite applied to right hemisphere damage. Since, however, this may have been a modality-specific phenomenon confined to the visual sphere, we wondered if a similar double dissociation would hold true for spoken language. Any finding supporting this view would be a strong argument in favor of a supramodal effect, thus confirming the notion that the left hemisphere is indeed generally more involved with the decoding of a message’s content while the right hemisphere is more preoccupied with ‘‘idiosyncratic’’ recognition of a message’s source or the author as an individual. Since most aphasics seem to know who is talking to them, even if the speaker is not readily visible, there is evidence that apperception of the denotative aspects of language, e.g., meaning and content, may be dissociated from the connotative aspects like intonation (prosody) or speaker identity. The individual or idiosyncratic characteristics of a person’s oral language have been termed ‘‘idiolect’’, an impairment in recognizing familiar voices ‘‘phonagnosia’’ [4–8]. We wondered if the awareness of a speaker’s identity may be preserved even with aphasia and, on the other hand, impaired with right hemisphere lesions that do not produce aphasia. Since little is known about this interrelationship, we assessed auditory language comprehension and author identification in a prospective study of stroke patients. Unlike some former reports in the literature, we carried out explicit aphasia testing to control for the influence of language disorder.

Voice recognition in aphasic and non-aphasic stroke patients.

Background: It is well known that about 20% of patients with anomic aphasia still show residual aphasic symptoms 1 year post onset. As we do not have any tests to reliably diagnose residual aphasia it is difficult to decide whether these persisting problems are signs of residual aphasia that have to be treated, or are indications of a normal variability in language use, which also may occur in elderly people. Aims: The main aim of this research is to find out whether there are variables in spontaneous communication of persons with residual aphasia (P-RA) that enable us to distinguish them from persons without aphasia (P-NA). Methods & Procedures: Following a detailed linguistic analysis of spontaneous speech we employed binary logistic regression analysis to find the most relevant variables for differentiation between P-RA (N = 41) and P-NA (N = 25). Outcomes & Results: Significant group differences at different processing levels could be observed. Lexically varied, informative, and cohesively tied phrase...

Martina Hielscher-Fastabend

Papers

Understanding Social Robots

Reliability and Validity of Cervical Auscultation

Emotional and linguistic perception of prosody. Reception of prosody.

Voice recognition in aphasic and non-aphasic stroke patients.

Diagnosing residual aphasia using spontaneous speech analysis