The Neural Control of Vocalization in Mammals: A Review

Jürgens, Uwe

doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2007.07.005

Cited by 394 publications

(419 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…The PAG is also implicated in the control of vocalization. As a relay station in the limbic vocalization-control pathway, it serves a gating function in the initiation of involuntarily produced vocalisations ( [18,30]; research mainly in monkeys). Although the exact mechanisms remain elusive, the PAG appears to play a role in the production of human laughter [12,[31][32][33].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reduction in 50-kHz call-numbers and suppression of tickling-associated positive affective behaviour after lesioning of the lateral hypothalamic parvafox nucleus in rats

Roccaro-Waldmeyer

Babalian

Müller

et al. 2016

Behavioural Brain Research

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h i g h l i g h t s• Wistar rats were tickled before and after excitotoxic lesioning of the lateral hypothalamic parvafox nucleus.• Ultrasonic vocalisations (USVs) that were emitted during the tickling of rats and their tendency to approach and follow the experimenter's hand were analysed.• Lesioning was considered successful if the number of parvalbuminimmunoreactive (PV-ir) cells in the area of the parvafox nucleus was reduced beyond a threshold level.• Rats with bilaterally successful lesions manifested the most profound surgery-associated reduction in the number of 50-kHz USVs and in the tendency to approach and follow the experimenter's hand.• Positive correlations were found between each of the four investigated parameters. g r a p h i c a l a b s t r a c tThe parvafox nucleus is located ventrolaterally in the lateral hypothalamic area (LHA). Its core and shell are composed of neurons expressing the calcium-binding protein parvalbumin (PV) and the transcription factor Foxb1, respectively. Given the known functions of the LHA and that the parvafox nucleus receives afferents from the lateral orbitofrontal cortex and projects to the periaqueductal gray matter, a functional role of this entity in the expression of positive emotions has been postulated.The purpose of the present study was to ascertain whether the deletion of neurons in the parvafox nucleus influenced the tickling-induced 50-kHz calls, which are thought to reflect positive affective states, in rats. To this end, tickling of the animals (heterospecific play) was combined with intracerebral injections of the excitotoxin kainic acid into the parvafox nucleus.The most pronounced surgery-associated reduction in 50-kHz call-numbers was observed in the group of rats in which, on the basis of PV-immunoreactive-cell counts in the parvafox nucleus, bilateral lesions had been successfully produced. Two other parameters that were implemented to quantify positive affective behaviour, namely, an approach towards and a following of the hand of the tickling * Corresponding author at: Institute of Anatomy, University of Fribourg, Rte A. Gockel 1, CH-1700 Fribourg, Switzerland.E-mail address: marco.celio@unifr.ch (M.R. Celio). 1Published in which should be cited to refer to this work.http://doc.rero.ch experimenter, were likewise most markedly suppressed in the group of rats with bilaterally successful lesions. Furthermore, positive correlations were found between each of the investigated parameters. Our data afford evidence that the parvafox nucleus plays a role in the production of 50-kHz calls in rats, and, more generally, in the expression of positive emotions.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reduction in 50-kHz call-numbers and suppression of tickling-associated positive affective behaviour after lesioning of the lateral hypothalamic parvafox nucleus in rats

Roccaro-Waldmeyer

Babalian

Müller

et al. 2016

Behavioural Brain Research

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“…Lesions to the ACC prevent the initiation of operantly conditioned vocalizations (Aitken, 1981;Sutton et al, 1974Sutton et al, , 1981, but have no effect on spontaneous vocalizations in affective contexts that would normally elicit these responses (Jü rgens and Pratt, 1979). Hence, the ACC in monkeys is believed to initiate volitional, but not reflexive, species-specific affective vocalizations via projections to the PAG (Jü rgens, 2002(Jü rgens, , 2009.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pitch underlies activation of the vocal system during affective vocalization

Belyk

Brown

2015

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

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Affective prosody is that aspect of speech that conveys a speaker's emotional state through modulations in various vocal parameters, most prominently pitch. While a large body of research implicates the cingulate vocalization area in controlling affective vocalizations in monkeys, no systematic test of functional homology for this area has yet been reported in humans. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain activations when subjects produced affective vocalizations in the form of exclamations vs non-affective vocalizations with similar pitch contours. We also examined the perception of affective vocalizations by having participants make judgments about either the emotions being conveyed by recorded affective vocalizations or the pitch contours of the same vocalizations. Production of affective vocalizations and matched pitch contours activated a highly overlapping set of brain areas, including the larynx-phonation area of the primary motor cortex and a region of the anterior cingulate cortex that is consistent with the macro-anatomical position of the cingulate vocalization area. This overlap contradicts the dominant view that these areas form two distinct vocal pathways with dissociable functions. Instead, we propose that these brain areas are nodes in a single vocal network, with an emphasis on pitch modulation as a vehicle for affective expression.

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“…Jürgens, 2009). These two systems may be thought of as two separate pathways connecting the cortex with the laryngeal motor neurons that control the vocal cords.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…It is found in all mammals and triggers species-specific emotional vocalizations. The basic acoustic structure of such vocalizations is predetermined by the pattern-generating neurons in medullary reticular formation and cannot be modified voluntarily (Hage, Gavrilov, & Nieder, 2013;U. Jürgens, 2009).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Direct cortical projections from M1 to laryngeal motor neurons are thought to be absent in nonhuman primates (U. Jürgens, 2009) and weak in other mammals (Arriaga, 2014;Petkov & Jarvis, 2012). In general, monosynaptic projections from motor cortex to laryngeal motor neurons appear to enable precise voluntary control of vocalizations in vocally gifted mammals, including humans (Schusterman, 2008).…”

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Nonlinguistic vocalizations from online amateur videos for emotion research: A validated corpus

2016

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This study introduces a corpus of 260 naturalistic human nonlinguistic vocalizations representing nine emotions: amusement, anger, disgust, effort, fear, joy, pain, pleasure, and sadness. The recognition accuracy in a rating task varied greatly per emotion, from <40% for joy and pain, to >70% for amusement, pleasure, fear, and sadness. In contrast, the raters' linguistic-cultural group had no effect on recognition accuracy: The predominantly English-language corpus was classified with similar accuracies by participants from Brazil, Russia, Sweden, and the UK/USA. Supervised random forest models classified the sounds as accurately as the human raters. The best acoustic predictors of emotion were pitch, harmonicity, and the spacing and regularity of syllables. This corpus of ecologically valid emotional vocalizations can be filtered to include only sounds with high recognition rates, in order to study reactions to emotional stimuli of known perceptual types (reception side), or can be used in its entirety to study the association between affective states and vocal expressions (production side).

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The Neural Control of Vocalization in Mammals: A Review

Cited by 394 publications

References 30 publications

Reduction in 50-kHz call-numbers and suppression of tickling-associated positive affective behaviour after lesioning of the lateral hypothalamic parvafox nucleus in rats

Reduction in 50-kHz call-numbers and suppression of tickling-associated positive affective behaviour after lesioning of the lateral hypothalamic parvafox nucleus in rats

Pitch underlies activation of the vocal system during affective vocalization

Nonlinguistic vocalizations from online amateur videos for emotion research: A validated corpus

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