Atypical hemispheric asymmetry in the perception of negative human vocalizations in individuals with Williams syndrome

Abstract

Williams syndrome is a neurological condition associated with high levels of auditory reactivity and emotional expression combined with impaired perception of prosody. Yet, little is currently known about the neural organization of affective auditory processing in individuals with this disorder. The current study examines auditory emotion processing in individuals with Williams syndrome. Hemispheric organization for positive and negative human non-linguistic sound processing was compared in participants with and without the disorder using a dichotic listening paradigm. While controls exhibited an expected right cerebral hemisphere advantage for processing negative sounds, those with Williams syndrome showed the opposite pattern. No differences between the groups emerged for the positive stimuli. The results suggest aberrant processing of negative auditory information in Williams syndrome.

Figure 1

Mean f-index values for participants with WS, TD, and DD across the negative and positive affective stimuli and ear of presentation (LE/RH and RE/LH). Negative f-index values indicate an LEA, whereas positive f-index values indicate a REA (Error bars represent ±1 standard error mean (SEM)).

Figure 2

Accuracy of participants’ ability to identify the binaurally presented individual negative and positive non-linguistic affective sounds used in the DL experiment (Error bars represent ±1 SEM).