Pressey Hall, located at 1070 Carmack Road, is home to the Department of Speech and Hearing Science. Credit: Caleb Blake | Photo Editor
People suffering from aphasia find it more difficult to come up with words when they interact with emotionally charged images and terms, according to a study published Jan. 10 by Ohio State researchers.
Aphasia — an impairment that affects a person’s ability to communicate, read and write — is often the result of a stroke that has damaged the left side of the brain, Deena Schwen Blackett — the first author of the study, who also received her Ph.D. from Ohio State in 2020 — said.
“In this particular study, we were looking at how emotional stimuli or emotional pictures and words affected how easily somebody could think of the word they want to say,” Blackett said.
The words and phrases were either emotionally positive, negative or neutral, Blackett said. Positive words and photos included bunnies and brownies while negative stimuli consisted of skulls and tarantulas.
The researchers discovered that people with aphasia were worse at word retrieval when faced with emotionally charged stimulants, which was observed through decreased accuracy among participants and longer response time, Blackett said.
This outcome is unique because emotions have been found by previous research to improve other language comprehension tasks like reading and writing in people with aphasia, Blackett said. She said the unexpected outcome may be due to the complexity of the tasks.
“It’s possible that for something like reading a word or writing a single word, it’s a bit more straightforward and a simpler type of task that the emotion might help,” Blackett said.
Blackett said researchers are not certain why emotions affect word retrieval in people with aphasia, but Stacy Harnish, an associate professor of speech and hearing science at Ohio State and co-author of the study, said the main theory involves emotions drawing attention away from word retrieval.
“If you’re trying to come up with a word and it’s difficult for you because of brain damage, you’re probably using your attentional resources [limited attention] to try to search for the word,” Harnish said. “Emotion could just be sort of a distracting factor.”
Blackett likened this distracting factor to a fear of public speaking. If someone is afraid of giving a presentation or speech, they experience negative emotions like fear, and they can freeze, unable to talk while trying to find the right words to say.
Based on the study’s findings, Blackett said that doctors and clinicians should be more aware of emotional stimulants on language assessments that are given to those experiencing aphasia.
“There’s a range of language assessments that we use as clinicians, and some of them actually do have emotional pictures or emotional words to elicit language, and that emotionality isn’t really considered and how we are interpreting the results of it,” Blackett said. “So, I think the study shows that we should be considering emotion and how we design these assessments and how we interpret them when they have emotional items on them.”
