Abstract
The ability to effectively respond to emotional information carried in the human voice plays a pivotal role for social interactions. We examined how genetic factors, especially the serotonin transporter genetic variation (5-HTTLPR), affect the neurodynamics of emotional voice processing in infants and adults by measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The results revealed that infants distinguish between emotions during an early perceptual processing stage, whereas adults recognize and evaluate the meaning of emotions during later semantic processing stages. While infants do discriminate between emotions, only in adults was genetic variation associated with neurophysiological differences in how positive and negative emotions are processed in the brain. This suggests that genetic association with neurocognitive functions emerges during development, emphasizing the role that variation in serotonin plays in the maturation of brain systems involved in emotion recognition.
Highlights
The human voice is the most important sound in our environment
Our analysis further revealed an interaction between the factors emotion and 5-HTTLPR genotype (F [2,54] = 7.61, p = 0.001, partial g2 = 0.22) during that time window, suggesting that genetic variation at this locus was associated with differences in the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) responses to emotional tone of voice
There were no differences in personality traits such as neuroticism or extraversion as measured by the NEO-FFI questionnaire associated with genetic variation of 5-HTTLPR
Summary
Our ability to analyze and effectively respond to information carried in the voice plays a pivotal role for social functioning. The voice carries speech information but it can be seen as an ‘‘auditory face’’ that enables us to recognize individuals and their emotional states [1]. Emotional tone of voice or emotional prosody comprises different acoustic parameters such as time structure, loudness, roughness, and fundamental frequency. Adult listeners can reliably and rapidly recognize different emotions on the basis of these vocal cues [5]. Recognizing emotional expressions during social interactions permits us to detect another person’s emotional state or reactions, and can provide cues on how to respond appropriately in different situations [8]. While there has been extensive work investigating the brain basis of voice processing in general [9,10] and emotional voice processing in particular [11,12], only very little is known about how individuals differ in processing emotional information carried in the voice and what factors may contribute to such differences
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