Emotional Prosody and Verbal Memory in Bipolar Disorder

The impact of emotional prosody on verbal memory was studied in euthymic bipolar 1 disorder patients and healthy control subjects (Altamura, Santamaria, Elia, Angelini, Paladino, Altamura et al., 2019). There were three groups created in which the participants had to listen to either a story told with positive, negative, and neutral prosody. In addition, recognition memory was tested.

It was found that words were better remembered when they were delivered in a neutral context.

The recognition of positive prosody in bipolar disorder patients did differ from that of healthy control subjects, due to a more worse recognition for that prosody as compared to negative and neutral prosody.

The findings show that there is a significant advantage in memory for prosody of neutral content. The bias in recognition of prosody of positive valence in bipolar disorder might cause negative verbal memories as well as a deficient emotion regulation in these patients (Altamura et al., 2019).