The evocative nature of emotional content for sensory and motor systems

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the emphasis in communication disorders has been on linguistic variables. Thus, aphasia continues to be characterized clinically by relative degrees of expressive and receptive language impairments.1 There has been less consideration of affective elements in communication, and emotional content and inflection has been generally considered to have a secondary role in modulating information content. There are three primary channels for emotional communication: facial, reflecting facial expression; prosodic, reflecting speech characteristics of pitch, loudness, tempo, stress, and rhythm; and lexical, reflecting the meaning and grammatical aspects of words. In this issue of Neurology , studies using two of these channels investigate the effects of emotional content on both signal perception and the response to different types of emotional processing. These studies indicate that emotional content plays a more important role in communication than simply shading meaning. …