Abstract
We aimed to progress understanding of prosodic emotion expression by establishing brain regions active when expressing specific emotions, those activated irrespective of the target emotion, and those whose activation intensity varied depending on individual performance. BOLD contrast data were acquired whilst participants spoke non-sense words in happy, angry or neutral tones, or performed jaw-movements. Emotion-specific analyses demonstrated that when expressing angry prosody, activated brain regions included the inferior frontal and superior temporal gyri, the insula, and the basal ganglia. When expressing happy prosody, the activated brain regions also included the superior temporal gyrus, insula, and basal ganglia, with additional activation in the anterior cingulate. Conjunction analysis confirmed that the superior temporal gyrus and basal ganglia were activated regardless of the specific emotion concerned. Nevertheless, disjunctive comparisons between the expression of angry and happy prosody established that anterior cingulate activity was significantly higher for angry prosody than for happy prosody production. Degree of inferior frontal gyrus activity correlated with the ability to express the target emotion through prosody. We conclude that expressing prosodic emotions (vs. neutral intonation) requires generic brain regions involved in comprehending numerous aspects of language, emotion-related processes such as experiencing emotions, and in the time-critical integration of speech information.
Highlights
In the study of social cognition, increasing efforts have been invested into learning more about how we transmit our communicative intent and alert other people as to our mental or emotional state of mind
For all three emotion conditions, the perceived expression accuracy was over 4 × greater than the 1-in-9 level of correct agreement expected by chance, a difference that was highly significant according to onesample t-test analyses [happy: t(25) = 10.75, p < 0.001, d = 2.108; neutral: t(25) = 11.55, p < 0.001, d = 1.776; anger: t(25) = 8.29, p < 0.001, d = 1.625]
The key findings of our study are that the conjunction analyses delineated common regions of activation for the expression of both angry and happy prosody in the superior temporal gyrus and basal ganglia
Summary
In the study of social cognition, increasing efforts have been invested into learning more about how we transmit our communicative intent and alert other people as to our mental or emotional state of mind. Prosody is one channel by which we can express such emotion cues. By varying non-verbal features of speech such as pitch, duration, amplitude, voice quality, and spectral properties (Ross, 2010), we can alter our tone of voice, and change the emotion conveyed. Beyond automatic and true reflections of our emotional state, conscious modulation of emotional prosody may be one of the most common emotion regulation strategies, with people frequently. Emotional Prosody Expression concealing or strategically posing their prosodic emotion cues in everyday interactions (Laukka et al, 2011). Because of the lag behind facial emotion research, its multiple functions (e.g., linguistic, attitudinal, motivational, affective), and multiple phonetic cues (e.g., pitch, duration, amplitude), the neural substrate of emotional prosody expression is less wellcharacterized (Gandour, 2000)
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