Investigation of receptive affective prosodic ability in school-aged boys with and without depression.

Objective: To investigate the accuracy of affective prosodic speech identification of 38 right-handed school-aged boys, half of whom had been classified as having depression and the other half as not having depression.

Background: There is support in the literature for relative right posterior hemisphere dysfunction in patients with depression. The literature also suggests that patients with depression may have difficulty processing receptive affective prosodic speech. Less is known, however, regarding the neuropsychology of depression in children. It was hypothesized that children with depression would demonstrate decreased ability in the identification of affective prosody.

Method: Participants were asked to identify happy, angry, sad, and neutral prosodies within congruent and incongruent verbal statements.

Results: As predicted, the ability of boys with depression to identify congruent and incongruent affective prosody was significantly lower compared with boys without depression.

Conclusion: The results of this experiment are discussed in terms of a right-hemisphere dysfunction model for depression in childhood.