Happy Intonation Research Articles

Responses to Semantically Neutral Words in Varying Emotional Intonations.

Purpose Recent research on perception of emotionally charged material has found both an "emotionality effect" in which participants respond differently to emotionally charged stimuli relative to neutral stimuli in some cognitive-linguistic tasks and a "negativity bias" in which participants respond differently to negatively charged stimuli relative to neutral and positively charged stimuli. The current study investigated young adult listeners' bias when responding to neutral-meaning words in 2 tasks that varied attention to emotional intonation. Method Half the participants completed a word identification task in which they were instructed to type a word they had heard presented binaurally through Sony stereo MDR-ZX100 headphones. The other half of the participants completed an intonation identification task in which they were instructed to use a SuperLab RB-740 button box to identify the emotional prosody of the same words over headphones. For both tasks, all auditory stimuli were semantically neutral words spoken in happy, sad, and neutral emotional intonations. Researchers measured percent correct and reaction time (RT) for each word in both tasks. Results In the word identification task, when identifying semantically neutral words spoken in happy, sad, and neutral intonations, listeners' RTs to words in a sad intonation were longer than RTs to words in a happy intonation. In the intonation identification task, when identifying the emotional intonation of the same words spoken in the same emotional tones of voice, listeners' RTs to words in a sad intonation were significantly faster than those in a neutral intonation. Conclusions Results demonstrate a potential attentional negativity bias for neutral words varying in emotional intonation. Such results support an attention-based theoretical account. In an intonation identification task, an advantage emerged for words in a negative (sad) intonation relative to words in a neutral intonation. Thus, current models of emotional speech should acknowledge the amount of attention to emotional content (i.e., prosody) necessary to complete a cognitive task, as it has the potential to bias processing.

Pathomechanisms and compensatory efforts related to Parkinsonian speech.

Voice and speech in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients are classically affected by a hypophonia, dysprosody, and dysarthria. The underlying pathomechanisms of these disabling symptoms are not well understood. To identify functional anomalies related to pathophysiology and compensation we compared speech-related brain activity and effective connectivity in early PD patients who did not yet develop voice or speech symptoms and matched controls. During fMRI 20 PD patients ON and OFF levodopa and 20 control participants read 75 sentences covertly, overtly with neutral, or with happy intonation. A cue-target reading paradigm allowed for dissociating task preparation from execution. We found pathologically reduced striato-prefrontal preparatory effective connectivity in early PD patients associated with subcortical (OFF state) or cortical (ON state) compensatory networks. While speaking, PD patients showed signs of diminished monitoring of external auditory feedback. During generation of affective prosody, a reduced functional coupling between the ventral and dorsal striatum was observed. Our results suggest three pathomechanisms affecting speech in PD: While diminished energization on the basis of striato-prefrontal hypo-connectivity together with dysfunctional self-monitoring mechanisms could underlie hypophonia, dysarthria may result from fading speech motor representations given that they are not sufficiently well updated by external auditory feedback. A pathological interplay between the limbic and sensorimotor striatum could interfere with affective modulation of speech routines, which affects emotional prosody generation. However, early PD patients show compensatory mechanisms that could help improve future speech therapies.

Auditory-prosodic processing in bipolar disorder; from sensory perception to emotion

ObjectivesAccurate emotion processing is critical to understanding the social world. Despite growing evidence of facial emotion processing impairments in patients with bipolar disorder (BD), comprehensive investigations of emotional prosodic processing is limited. The existing (albeit sparse) literature is inconsistent at best, and confounded by failures to control for the effects of gender or low level sensory-perceptual impairments. The present study sought to address this paucity of research by utilizing a novel behavioural battery to comprehensively investigate the auditory-prosodic profile of BD. MethodsFifty BD patients and 52 healthy controls completed tasks assessing emotional and linguistic prosody, and sensitivity for discriminating tones that deviate in amplitude, duration and pitch. ResultsBD patients were less sensitive than their control counterparts in discriminating amplitude and durational cues but not pitch cues or linguistic prosody. They also demonstrated impaired ability to recognize happy intonations; although this was specific to male's with the disorder. The recognition of happy in the patient group was correlated with pitch and amplitude sensitivity in female patients only. LimitationsThe small sample size of patients after stratification by current mood state prevented us from conducting subgroup comparisons between symptomatic, euthymic and control participants to explicitly examine the effects of mood. ConclusionsOur findings indicate the existence of a female advantage for the processing of emotional prosody in BD, specifically for the processing of happy. Although male BD patients were impaired in their ability to recognize happy prosody, this was unrelated to reduced tone discrimination sensitivity. This study indicates the importance of examining both gender and low order sensory perceptual capacity when examining emotional prosody.

Sex differences in brain control of prosody

Affective (emotional) prosody is a neuropsychological function that encompasses non-verbal aspects of language that are necessary for recognizing and conveying emotions in communication, whereas non-affective (linguistic) prosody indicates whether the sentence is a question, an order or a statement. Considerable evidence points to a dominant role for the right hemisphere in both aspects of prosodic function. However, it has yet to be established whether separate parts of the right hemisphere are involved in processing different kinds of emotional intonation. The aim of this study was to answer this question. In addition, the issue of sex differences in the ability to understand prosody was considered. Fifty-two patients with damage to frontal, temporo-parietal or subcortical (basal) parts of the right hemisphere and 26 controls were tested for their ability to assess prosody information in normal (well-formed) sentences and in pseudo-sentences. General impairment of prosody processing was seen in all patient groups but the effect of damage was more apparent for emotional rather than linguistic prosody. Interestingly, appreciation of emotional prosody appeared to depend on the type of emotional expression and the location of the brain lesion. The patients with frontal damage were mostly impaired in comprehension of happy intonations; those with temporo-parietal damage in assessment of sad intonations, while subcortical lesions mostly affected comprehension of angry intonations. Differential effects of lesion location on the performance of men and women were also observed. Frontal lesions were more detrimental to women, whereas subcortical lesions led to stronger impairment in men. This suggests sex differences in brain organization of prosodic functions.

Left-lateralized fMRI activation in the temporal lobe of high repressive women during the identification of sad prosodies

We investigated with fMRI whether different lateralization types of cortical activation in prosodic tasks are caused by individually different stress-related coping strategies. After healthy women had been classified as high or low repressive they performed four different identification tasks with acoustically presented speech material while being in the MR scanner. The two materials presented in blocks were emotionally irrelevant CV syllables and adjectives with a mix of different prosodic intonations. Sad and happy intonations had to be targeted by two affective identification tasks in the same adjective mixtures. For testing stimulus-material effects the phoneme /a/ had to be identified both in the syllables and the adjectives. This design allowed us to test influences of coping strategies and affective tasks on cortical activation in both hemispheres. Results showed no differences in global cortical lateralization as a function of high or low repressiveness and no global support for either the valence hypothesis or the right-hemisphere hypothesis of emotional processing. However, we observed differences in auditory and speech cortex. In accordance to the construct of repression/sensitization, high repressive women showed larger left, low repressive women larger right hemisphere activation during the identification of sad intonations. Thus, differences in stress-related coping strategies may not lead to general differences in cortical lateralization, but may depend on specific elicitors and task-relevant brain areas. In contrast, the identification of happy intonations led to strong and right-lateralized global cortical activation independent of coping strategies which complies with the right-hemisphere hypothesis of emotional processing. In addition, this may reflect general cognitive and arousal effects of task difficulty as well as auditory cue-specific attentional effects.

Perceptual and acoustic correlates of affective prosody repetition in transcortical aphasias

Abstract Perceptual judgements and acoustic analyses of affective prosody during sentence repetition were examined in four patients with transcortical aphasias and in two normal controls. Although all aphasic patients had a relative preservation of sentence repetition, perceptual ratings revealed that they repeated using correct affective intonation significantly less frequently than normal control subjects. Acoustic analysis revealed that patients with transcortical aphasias were unable to impart angry and happy intonation during repetition, producing flat intonation contours in most sentences. Restricted modulation of F0 and flat declinations of repeated utterances were found in patients with transcortical aphasias caused by lesions within the left perisylvian language area as well as outside this area. These findings suggest that repetition of affective prosody in transcortical aphasias is usually disrupted regardless of the intrahemispheric location (perisylvian or extraperisylvian) of the lesion, and...