Recognition of emotional prosody and verbal components of spoken language: an fMRI study

Abstract

This study examined the neural areas involved in the recognition of both emotional prosody and phonemic components of words Ž . expressed in spoken language using echo-planar, functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI . Ten right-handed males were asked to Ž . discriminate words based on either expressed emotional tone angry, happy, sad, or neutral or phonemic characteristics, specifically, Ž . initial consonant sound bower, dower, power, or tower . Significant bilateral activity was observed in the detection of both emotional and verbal aspects of language when compared to baseline activity. We found that the detection of emotion compared with verbal detection resulted in significant activity in the right inferior frontal lobe. Conversely, the detection of verbal stimuli compared with the detection of emotion activated left inferior frontal lobe regions most significantly. Specific analysis of the anterior auditory cortex revealed increased right hemisphere activity during the detection of emotion compared to activity during verbal detection. These findings illustrate bilateral involvement in the detection of emotion in language while concomitantly showing significantly lateralized activity in both emotional and verbal detection, in both the temporal and frontal lobes. q

Processing of emotional vocalizations in bilateral inferior frontal cortex

“…Similarly, emotional prosody, that is, the emotionally influenced tone of a voice (Banse and Scherer, 1996), elicits strong and replicable right IFC activation (e.g. Buchanan et al, 2000;George et al, 1996;Wildgruber et al, 2004). This finding supports early proposals of the critical involvement of the right hemisphere in prosody processing in general (Ross, 1981) and specifically emotional prosody (Ross andMonnot, 2008, 2011;Ross et al, 1997;van Lancker, 1980).…”

“…The available data support the notion of a cognitive controlled evaluation. But this seems not to be restricted to an explicit attentive focus on the emotional cues in voices, given that IFC activity was also found when the emotional value of voices was processed preattentively, such as when it was presented outside the focus of attention (Belin et al, 2008a;Buchanan et al, 2000;Fecteau et al, 2005;Morris et al, 1999;Sander et al, 2005;Wildgruber et al, 2004Wildgruber et al, , 2005.…”

On the lateralization of emotional prosody: An event-related functional MR investigation

“…Given the few fMRI (Buchanan et al, 2000;George et al, 1996) studies and a vast majority of lesion studies (e.g., Blonder et al, 1991;Starkstein et al, 1994) that report right hemisphere lateralization of emotional prosody, our results deserve a solid discussion. Regarding the first issue there is lesion evidence that strongly supports the notion of a bilateral distribution of emotional prosody (Cancelliere & Kertesz, 1990;Van Lancker & Sidtis, 1992) and this is in line with the current data.…”

“…Regarding the issue of emotional valence, previous imaging studies by George et al (1996) and Buchanan et al (2000) do not report lateralization of emotional prosody as a function of valence. This null result is further supported by some recent lesion data that correlated aprosodic syndromes with bilateral lesion sites (Cancelliere & Kertesz, 1990;Ross et al, 1997).…”

“…Regarding the role of non-linguistic prosodic cues that correlate with emotional prosody in language comprehension, results of recent brain potential studies (Kotz, Alter, Besson, Schirmer, & Friederici, 2000;Pihan, Ackermann, & Altenm€ u uller, 1997, 2000 and of two brain imaging studies (Buchanan et al, 2000;George et al, 1996). All of these studies above indicate that emotional prosody may be processed in the right hemisphere (Buchanan et al, 2000;George et al, 1996), but may also induce bilateral activation patterns as a function of subvocal rehearsal (Pihan et al, 2000) or task type (Kotz et al, 2000).…”