Abstract
A voice from kin species conveys indispensable social and affective signals with uniquely phylogenetic and ontogenetic standpoints. However, the neural underpinning of emotional voices, beyond low-level acoustic features, activates a processing chain that proceeds from the auditory pathway to the brain structures implicated in cognition and emotion. By using a passive auditory oddball paradigm, which employs emotional voices, this study investigates the test–retest reliability of emotional mismatch negativity (MMN), indicating that the deviants of positively (happily)- and negatively (angrily)-spoken syllables, as compared to neutral standards, can trigger MMN as a response to an automatic discrimination of emotional salience. The neurophysiological estimates of MMN to positive and negative deviants appear to be highly reproducible, irrespective of the subject’s attentional disposition: whether the subjects are set to a condition that involves watching a silent movie or do a working memory task. Specifically, negativity bias is evinced as threatening, relative to positive vocalizations, consistently inducing larger MMN amplitudes, regardless of the day and the time of a day. The present findings provide evidence to support the fact that emotional MMN offers a stable platform to detect subtle changes in current emotional shifts.
Highlights
Mismatch Negativity (MMN) is a differential wave obtained by subtracting the auditory eventrelated potential (ERP) component evoked by frequent, repetitive “standard” sounds from the ERP component evoked in response to the infrequent deviants that are interspersed within a constant auditory stream
Newborns have been found to be sensitive to emotional voices beyond specific language and exhibit the comparable ability with adults to process the affective information in voices (Fan et al, 2013; Hung and Cheng, 2014; Chen et al, 2015)
Neutral syllables were employed as standard (S), and happy and angry syllables designed as two isometric deviants (D1 and D2) followed the oddball paradigm
Summary
Mismatch Negativity (MMN) is a differential wave obtained by subtracting the auditory eventrelated potential (ERP) component evoked by frequent, repetitive “standard” sounds from the ERP component evoked in response to the infrequent deviants that are interspersed within a constant auditory stream. When meaningless syllables “dada” are spoken with emotionally neutral, happy, or disgusted prosodies, administered by way of a passive oddball paradigm, disgusted deviants in comparison with happy deviants have been seen to elicit stronger magnetoencephalographic counterparts of MMN (MMNm) and MMNm-related cortical activities in the right anterior insular cortex, a region that has been previously demonstrated as critical in the processing of negative emotions, such as disgusted facial expressions (Chen et al, 2014) This procedure has been employed to measure voice and emotional processing in infants (Cheng et al, 2012; Zhang et al, 2014). Voices with affective information are supposed to elicit higher recruitment of associated resources than those with non-affective information
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