Disentangling the brain networks supporting affective speech comprehension

Abstract

Areas involved in social cognition, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) appear to be active during the classification of sentences according to emotional criteria (happy, angry or sad, [Beaucousin et al., 2007]). These two regions are frequently co-activated in studies about theory of mind (ToM). To confirm that these regions constitute a coherent network during affective speech comprehension, new event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired, using the emotional and grammatical-person sentence classification tasks on a larger sample of 51 participants. The comparison of the emotional and grammatical tasks confirmed the previous findings. Functional connectivity analyses established a clear demarcation between a "Medial" network, including the mPFC and TPJ regions, and a bilateral "Language" network, which gathered inferior frontal and temporal areas. These findings suggest that emotional speech comprehension results from interactions between language, ToM and emotion processing networks. The language network, active during both tasks, would be involved in the extraction of lexical and prosodic emotional cues, while the medial network, active only during the emotional task, would drive the making of inferences about the sentences' emotional content, based on their meanings. The left and right amygdalae displayed a stronger response during the emotional condition, but were seldom correlated with the other regions, and thus formed a third entity. Finally, distinct regions belonging to the Language and Medial networks were found in the left angular gyrus, where these two systems could interface.