Non-voluntary and voluntary processing of emotional prosody: an event-related potentials study

Abstract

The present study investigated whether event-related potentials (ERPs) reflect non-voluntary vs voluntary processing of emotional prosody. ERPs were obtained while participants processed emotional information non-voluntarily (i.e. while evaluating semantic characteristics of a stimulus) and voluntarily (i.e. while evaluating emotional characteristics of a stimulus). Results suggest that emotional prosody is processed around 160 ms after stimulus onset under non-voluntary processing conditions (when the attention is diverted from the emotional meaning of the tone of voice); and around 360 ms under voluntary processing conditions. The findings support the notion that emotional prosody is processed non-voluntarily in the comprehension of a spoken message.

Vocal emotions influence verbal memory: Neural correlates and interindividual differences

“…Taken together, the above-mentioned findings and related work (de Gelder, Pourtois, & Weiskrantz, 2002;Ishii, Kobayashi, & Kitayama, 2010;Sauter & Eimer, 2010;Wambacq, Shea-Miller & Abubakr 2004) have demonstrated that emotional voices influence listeners by boosting early auditory, and possibly more general (e.g., emotional), processing, regardless of the listeners' concurrent attentional state. However, the extant work is relatively silent on the question of whether emotional voices affect listeners beyond the immediate present.…”

“…Previous research on vocal encoding had revealed larger P200 amplitudes for emotionally than for neutrally spoken words, highlighting the P200 as a potential marker of emotional processing (Paulmann & Kotz, 2008;Paulmann et al, 2010;Sauter & Eimer, 2010;Wambacq et al, 2004). However, the susceptibility of this component to physical stimulus characteristics raises the possibility that voice-related P200 amplitude differences reflect sensory processing instead.…”

“…Of particular interest were previously identified ERP markers of emotional processing. As we reviewed above, attended emotional vocalizations elicited a greater P200 relative to attended neutral vocalizations (Paulmann & Kotz, 2008;Sauter & Eimer, 2010;Wambacq et al, 2004). We asked whether this effect would predict subsequent differences in verbal memory and word valence.…”

Recognition of affective prosody in brain-damaged patients and healthy controls: A neurophysiological study using EEG and whole-head MEG

“…In summary, the data diverge considerably on the question of whether the pattern of brain activity is strongly right-lateralized (e.g., Mitchell, Elliott, Barry, Cruttenden, & Woodruff, 2003;Wildgruber et al, 2005) or virtually symmetrical (e.g., Kotz et al, 2003). Among the factors possibly leading to different findings in different imaging studies are task requirements (e.g., paying attention to prosody or not); the amount and importance of semantic information delivered by the same stimuli that bear emotional information (e.g., words, pseudowords, exclamations); specific emotions, such as fear, that lead to particular activation patterns; basic physical stimulus features such as F0, intensity, and (in fMRI experiments) duration; 2 and finally, the nonspecific arousal elicited by stimuli (e.g., Mitchell et al, 2003;Sander et al, 2005;Schirmer et al, 2005;Wambacq et al, 2004;Wildgruber et al, 2005). A recent study even showed that the additional activation of the right middle superior temporal gyrus over its left tempoto disentangle the two components, although both distinguished between emotionally positive standards and emotionally negative deviants.…”

“…However, when subjects had to pay attention to prosody and judge its congruence, the difference between men and women disappeared (Schirmer, Kotz, & Friederici, 2005). Wambacq, Shea-Miller, and Abubakr (2004) reported an increased ERP positivity to spoken words with negative affective prosody (as compared with words with neutral prosody), whose latency varied as a function of attention; no interaction between the consecutive words (i.e., priming) was reported. Recently, Kotz and Paulmann (2007) and Paulmann and Kotz (2008b) used a set of sentences containing violations of emotional and semantic context.…”