Abstract
Emotional expressions of others embedded in speech prosodies are important for social interactions. This study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to investigate how speech prosodies of different emotional categories are processed in the cortex. The results demonstrated several cerebral areas critical for emotional prosody processing. We confirmed that the superior temporal cortex, especially the right middle and posterior parts of superior temporal gyrus (BA 22/42), primarily works to discriminate between emotional and neutral prosodies. Furthermore, the results suggested that categorization of emotions occurs within a high-level brain region–the frontal cortex, since the brain activation patterns were distinct when positive (happy) were contrasted to negative (fearful and angry) prosody in the left middle part of inferior frontal gyrus (BA 45) and the frontal eye field (BA8), and when angry were contrasted to neutral prosody in bilateral orbital frontal regions (BA 10/11). These findings verified and extended previous fMRI findings in adult brain and also provided a “developed version” of brain activation for our following neonatal study.
Highlights
While the above-mentioned studies have formed a solid groundwork for the understanding of emotional prosody perception, rarely did these studies find activation differences between positive and negative prosody
FMRI studies on the effects of emotional sounds are unavoidably interfered with the gradient noise of the scanner so the fMRI-based results are necessary to be verified and complemented by a silent imaging method such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy[25]
It is worth stressing that the use of fNIRS is irreplaceable for this purpose, because alternative methods such as fMRI and electroencephalography (EEG) cannot map the brain activation of conscious newborns with a high spatial resolution
Summary
While the above-mentioned studies have formed a solid groundwork for the understanding of emotional prosody perception, rarely did these studies find activation differences between positive and negative prosody It is well known that the activation pattern of human brain is not the same for all emotions[23,24], the question of how verbal expressions of different emotional categories elicit activation in temporal and frontal regions has been scarcely investigated[8] (for the only exception, see the fMRI study by Kotz et al.,[15] who found the bilateral superior middle frontal gyrus had enhanced activation for angry relative to neutral prosody while the left IFG had enhanced activation for happy relative to neutral prosody). The first aim of the present study was to provide an fNIRS-based knowledge of how speech prosodies of different emotional categories elicit activation in adult brain. Another purpose of the current study was to provide a “developed version” of auditory response pattern to an on-going neonatal experiment in our lab. Since there is little knowledge of the brain activity associated with different categories of affective prosody, no hypothesis was made regarding the exact (if any) frontal areas that take part in decoding distinct affective cues embedded in happy, angry and fearful prosodies
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