Sad Prosody Research Articles

Functional alterations of lateral temporal cortex for processing voice prosody in adults with autism spectrum disorder.

The human auditory system includes discrete cortical patches and selective regions for processing voice information, including emotional prosody. Although behavioral evidence indicates individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties in recognizing emotional prosody, it remains understudied whether and how localized voice patches (VPs) and other voice-sensitive regions are functionally altered in processing prosody. This fMRI study investigated neural responses to prosodic voices in 25 adult males with ASD and 33 controls using voices of anger, sadness, and happiness with varying degrees of emotion. We used a functional region-of-interest analysis with an independent voice localizer to identify multiple VPs from combined ASD and control data. We observed a general response reduction to prosodic voices in specific VPs of left posterior temporal VP (TVP) and right middle TVP. Reduced cortical responses in right middle TVP were consistently correlated with the severity of autistic symptoms for all examined emotional prosodies. Moreover, representation similarity analysis revealed the reduced effect of emotional intensity in multivoxel activation patterns in left anterior superior temporal cortex only for sad prosody. These results indicate reduced response magnitudes to voice prosodies in specific TVPs and altered emotion intensity-dependent multivoxel activation patterns in adult ASDs, potentially underlying their socio-communicative difficulties.

Recognition of Emotional Prosody in Mandarin-Speaking Children: Effects of Age, Noise, and Working Memory.

Age, babble noise, and working memory have been found to affect the recognition of emotional prosody based on non-tonal languages, yet little is known about how exactly they influence tone-language-speaking children's recognition of emotional prosody. In virtue of the tectonic theory of Stroop effects and the Ease of Language Understanding (ELU) model, this study aimed to explore the effects of age, babble noise, and working memory on Mandarin-speaking children's understanding of emotional prosody. Sixty Mandarin-speaking children aged three to eight years and 20 Mandarin-speaking adults participated in this study. They were asked to recognize the happy or sad prosody of short sentences with different semantics (negative, neutral, or positive) produced by a male speaker. The results revealed that the prosody-semantics congruity played a bigger role in children than in adults for accurate recognition of emotional prosody in quiet, but a less important role in children compared with adults in noise. Furthermore, concerning the recognition accuracy of emotional prosody, the effect of working memory on children was trivial despite the listening conditions. But for adults, it was very prominent in babble noise. The findings partially supported the tectonic theory of Stroop effects which highlights the perceptual enhancement generated by cross-channel congruity, and the ELU model which underlines the importance of working memory in speech processing in noise. These results suggested that the development of emotional prosody recognition is a complex process influenced by the interplay among age, background noise, and working memory.

Age and sex differences in emotion perception are influenced by emotional category and communication channel.

Sex differences in verbal and nonverbal emotion processing in older individuals are underexplored despite declining emotional performance with age. This study aimed to investigate the nature of sex differences in age-related decline in emotion perception, exploring modulatory effects on communication channels and emotion categories. Seventy-three older adults (43 female participants, aged 60-89 years) and 74 younger adults (37 female participants, aged 18-30 years) completed a task to recognize basic emotions (i.e., anger, happiness, neutrality, sadness) expressed by female or male encoders through verbal (i.e., semantic) and nonverbal (i.e., facial and prosodic) channels. Female participants consistently demonstrated an overall advantage in emotion perception and expression across both age cohorts. In older adults, this superiority was heightened in decoding angry and sad faces, as well as angry prosody and happy and sad semantics. However, older individuals exhibited decreased sensitivities to angry semantics, sad prosody, and neutral prosody from female encoders, whereas they showed heightened sensitivities to happy faces from female encoders and angry faces from male encoders. Both older and younger adults displayed age-related changes in sex interactions specific to emotional categories and channels. But neither own-sex nor opposite-sex bias was systematically observed across the two age groups. These results suggest that explicit emotion processing involves an intricate integration of individual and contextual differences, with significant age and sex interplay linked to specific emotions and channels. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Detecting Emotional Prosody in Real Words: Electrophysiological Evidence From a Modified Multifeature Oddball Paradigm.

Emotional voice conveys important social cues that demand listeners' attention and timely processing. This event-related potential study investigated the feasibility of a multifeature oddball paradigm to examine adult listeners' neural responses to detecting emotional prosody changes in nonrepeating naturally spoken words. Thirty-three adult listeners completed the experiment by passively listening to the words in neutral and three alternating emotions while watching a silent movie. Previous research documented preattentive change-detection electrophysiological responses (e.g., mismatch negativity [MMN], P3a) to emotions carried by fixed syllables or words. Given that the MMN and P3a have also been shown to reflect extraction of abstract regularities over repetitive acoustic patterns, this study employed a multifeature oddball paradigm to compare listeners' MMN and P3a to emotional prosody change from neutral to angry, happy, and sad emotions delivered with hundreds of nonrepeating words in a single recording session. Both MMN and P3a were successfully elicited by the emotional prosodic change over the varying linguistic context. Angry prosody elicited the strongest MMN compared with happy and sad prosodies. Happy prosody elicited the strongest P3a in the centro-frontal electrodes, and angry prosody elicited the smallest P3a. The results demonstrated that listeners were able to extract the acoustic patterns for each emotional prosody category over constantly changing spoken words. The findings confirm the feasibility of the multifeature oddball paradigm in investigating emotional speech processing beyond simple acoustic change detection, which may potentially be applied to pediatric and clinical populations.

Emotional Speech Processing in 3- to 12-Month-Old Infants: Influences of Emotion Categories and Acoustic Parameters.

The aim of this study was to investigate infants' listening preference for emotional prosodies in spoken words and identify their acoustic correlates. Forty-six 3- to-12-month-old infants (M age = 7.6 months) completed a central fixation (or look-to-listen) paradigm in which four emotional prosodies (happy, sad, angry, and neutral) were presented. Infants' looking time to the string of words was recorded as a proxy of their listening attention. Five acoustic variables-mean fundamental frequency (F0), word duration, intensity variation, harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), and spectral centroid-were also analyzed to account for infants' attentiveness to each emotion. Infants generally preferred affective over neutral prosody, with more listening attention to the happy and sad voices. Happy sounds with breathy voice quality (low HNR) and less brightness (low spectral centroid) maintained infants' attention more. Sad speech with shorter word duration (i.e., faster speech rate), less breathiness, and more brightness gained infants' attention more than happy speech did. Infants listened less to angry than to happy and sad prosodies, and none of the acoustic variables were associated with infants' listening interests in angry voices. Neutral words with a lower F0 attracted infants' attention more than those with a higher F0. Neither age nor sex effects were observed. This study provides evidence for infants' sensitivity to the prosodic patterns for the basic emotion categories in spoken words and how the acoustic properties of emotional speech may guide their attention. The results point to the need to study the interplay between early socioaffective and language development.

Age and sex effects in emotional prosody processing revealed in infants' mismatch responses but not in preferential looking time

Emotional prosody is crucial in early communication, but the developmental trend and the emergence of sex differences in infants’ emotional processing remain unclear. This report compared 46 infants’ behavioral and neurophysiological responses to four vocal emotions (happy, angry, sad, and neutral). We used a central fixation paradigm to measure infants’ listening times to different emotions and a multi-feature oddball paradigm with electroencephalography (EEG) recordings to measure infants’ mismatch responses (MMRs) to vocal emotional changes. We modified both paradigms by including non-repeating words within each emotion, enforcing infant listeners to respond to the overarching emotional prosodic category. We only observed age and sex effects in infants’ MMRs. Older infants showed more negative MMRs to happy and sad voices than younger infants, but more positive MMRs to angry voices. Female infants showed more positive MMRs at a later time window than male infants across all emotional changes, indicating an emotion-general sex effect. The behavioral study showed longer listening times for happy and sad prosodies across age and sex. The findings indicate that neurophysiological measurement may be more sensitive in capturing age and sex effects in early emotional prosody perception when complex speech materials are used.

Sex differences in behavioral and brain responses to incongruity in emotional speech controlling for autistic traits

Accurate interpretation of speech requires the integration of verbal and nonverbal signals. This study investigated sex differences in behavior and neural activities associated with the integration of semantic content and emotional speech prosody, while the level of autistic traits was controlled for. Adults listened to Cantonese words spoken with happy and sad prosody, and made judgments on semantic valence while event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded. Behaviorally, men were slower than women in making semantic valence judgments. At the neural level, men had a greater congruity effect in the N400 component, whereas women had a greater congruity effect in the 1150–1300 ms time window for happy prosodies. There was no effect of sex in case of sad prosodies. Our study reveals novel findings on sex differences in the timing of the integration between verbal and non-verbal signals that cannot be explained by differences in autistic traits.

Emotional speech prosody perception in the first year of life

Prosodic aspects of speech are considered more salient than linguistic features in prenatal listening environment. The literature on early prosodic speech perception has been largely focused on the role of infant-directed speech in language development. While emotional prosody is also ubiquitous and contains diverse social cues, its perceptual development trajectory remains unclear. The current study adopted the central fixation paradigm to investigate 3- to 12-month-old infants' preferential listening attention to English monosyllabic words spoken in neutral, happy, angry, and sad tones. Forty-six infants completed the experiment and were assigned to younger and older groups with the median cut-off age of 8 months. Linear mixed-effect model results revealed a prevailing trend of shorter listening time for the sad tone. Furthermore, this reduced level of attention was only statistically significant in the younger infants but not the older group, suggesting that the lower-pitched and longer sad prosody was least attractive to the younger infants. With more exposure to emotional speech and the ongoing neural commitment towards language-specific speech perception in the older infants, the early differential interests in voice emotions showed signs of mitigation in the context of spoken words, leading to a relative increase in their listening time to the sad tone.

The development of emotional speech prosody perception in 3- to 14-month infants: a preferential listening study

Developmental studies have shown strong evidence that socially enriched speech signal (including prosodic modifications) attracts infants’ attention and facilitates language development. While emotion understanding is evident at 9 months of age (Otte et al., 2015), the developmental trajectory of the emotional speech prosody perception is still unclear. The present study adopted a widely used preferential looking paradigm to measure 3- to 14-month-old infants’ listening preference to English words spoken in neutral, happy, angry, and sad tones. Analysis using a linear mixed model showed that infants’ preference of emotional prosody changed as a function of age. On average, the three-month olds listened longer to all emotional prosodies over the neutral one whereas older infants showed significantly diminished interests in the sad prosody, followed by the happy and angry voices. Around 12 months, infants appeared to listen to emotional prosodies equally with the exception of reduced interest in the angry prosody. These preferential listening measures were not correlated with the varying durations or fundamental frequencies of the spoken words for the different emotional categories, indicating that the development of emotional speech prosody is not purely driven by the acoustical properties but rather involves higher-order social cognition.

Neural evidence for reduced automaticity in processing emotional prosody among men with high levels of autistic traits

This study aimed to examine individual differences in the integration of emotional prosody when processing semantic meaning in speech among men with high and low levels of autistic traits, as measured by the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). The behavioral and neural responses of high- and low-AQ men during semantic valence judgment were compared. The stimuli were positive or negative words spoken with either happy or sad prosody; in other words, the prosody was either congruous or incongruous to the valence of meaning. Participants were required to judge the (positive vs. negative) valence of word meaning as accurately and as quickly as possible while ignoring emotional prosody. Behavioral results showed that high-AQ men responded significantly more slowly than low-AQ men in all stimulus conditions, indicating lower automaticity in processing emotional speech. Neural data revealed that low-AQ men (but not high-AQ men) had significantly increased N200 and N400 amplitudes for incongruous (compared to congruous) stimuli spoken with happy prosody. Our findings supported our hypotheses that high levels of autistic traits are associated with reduced behavioral automaticity and less differential neural resources allocated to processing emotional speech stimuli with different cognitive demands.

Prosody-Based Sound-Emotion Associations in Poetry.

Conveying emotions in spoken poetry may be based on a poem's semantic content and/or on emotional prosody, i.e., on acoustic features above single speech sounds. However, hypotheses of more direct sound–emotion relations in poetry, such as those based on the frequency of occurrence of certain phonemes, have not withstood empirical (re)testing. Therefore, we investigated sound–emotion associations based on prosodic features as a potential alternative route for the, at least partially, non-semantic expression and perception of emotions in poetry. We first conducted a pre-study designed to validate relevant parameters of joy- and sadness-supporting prosody in the recitation, i.e. acoustic production, of poetry. The parameters obtained thereof guided the experimental modification of recordings of German joyful and sad poems such that for each poem, three prosodic variants were constructed: one with a joy-supporting prosody, one with a sadness-supporting prosody, and a neutral variant. In the subsequent experiment, native German speakers and participants with no command of German rated the joyfulness and sadness of these three variants. This design allowed us to investigate the role of emotional prosody, operationalized in terms of sound-emotion parameters, both in combination with and dissociated from semantic access to the emotional content of the poems. The findings from our pre-study showed that the emotional content of poems (based on pre-classifications into joyful and sad) indeed predicted the prosodic features pitch and articulation rate. The subsequent perception experiment revealed that cues provided by joyful and sad prosody specifically affect non-German-speaking listeners' emotion ratings of the poems. Thus, the present investigation lends support to the hypothesis of prosody-based iconic relations between perceived emotion and sound qualia. At the same time, our findings also highlight that semantic access substantially decreases the role of cross-language sound–emotion associations and indicate that non-German-speaking participants may also use phonetic and prosodic cues other than the ones that were targeted and manipulated here.

The effects of sad prosody on hemispheric specialization for words processing

This study examined the effect of sad prosody on hemispheric specialization for word processing using behavioral and electrophysiological measures. A dichotic listening task combining focused attention and signal-detection methods was conducted to evaluate the detection of a word spoken in neutral or sad prosody. An overall right ear advantage together with leftward lateralization in early (150–170ms) and late (240–260ms) processing stages was found for word detection, regardless of prosody. Furthermore, the early stage was most pronounced for words spoken in neutral prosody, showing greater negative activation over the left than the right hemisphere. In contrast, the later stage was most pronounced for words spoken with sad prosody, showing greater positive activation over the left than the right hemisphere. The findings suggest that sad prosody alone was not sufficient to modulate hemispheric asymmetry in word-level processing. We posit that lateralized effects of sad prosody on word processing are largely dependent on the psychoacoustic features of the stimuli as well as on task demands.

Mismatch negativity of sad syllables is absent in patients with major depressive disorder.

BackgroundMajor depressive disorder (MDD) is an important and highly prevalent mental disorder characterized by anhedonia and a lack of interest in everyday activities. Additionally, patients with MDD appear to have deficits in various cognitive abilities. Although a number of studies investigating the central auditory processing of low-level sound features in patients with MDD have demonstrated that this population exhibits impairments in automatic processing, the influence of emotional voice processing has yet to be addressed. To explore the automatic processing of emotional prosodies in patients with MDD, we analyzed the ability to detect automatic changes using event-related potentials (ERPs).MethodThis study included 18 patients with MDD and 22 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Subjects were instructed to watch a silent movie but to ignore the afferent acoustic emotional prosodies presented to both ears while continuous electroencephalographic activity was synchronously recorded. Prosodies included meaningless syllables, such as “dada” spoken with happy, angry, sad, or neutral tones. The mean amplitudes of the ERPs elicited by emotional stimuli and the peak latency of the emotional differential waveforms were analyzed.ResultsThe sad MMN was absent in patients with MDD, whereas the happy and angry MMN components were similar across groups. The abnormal sad emotional MMN component was not significantly correlated with the HRSD-17 and HAMA scores, respectively.ConclusionThe data indicate that patients with MDD are impaired in their ability to automatically process sad prosody, whereas their ability to process happy and angry prosodies remains normal. The dysfunctional sad emotion-related MMN in patients with MDD were not correlated with depression symptoms. The blunted MMN of sad prosodies could be considered a trait of MDD.

Preschoolers’ Perception of Vocal Emotion

Perception of a speaker's emotional state is based upon auditory as well as visual cues.Researchers mainly focused on studying emotions that conveyed by visual cues,such as facial expressions recognition research;however,the developmental trend of preschoolers' emotion understanding based on auditory cues was not very clear.Emotions of a speaker are carried in two vocal channels:prosody and semantic.To explore preschoolers' perceptive characteristics of vocal emotions,two experiments were conducted in view of prosody and semantic.In Experiment 1,124 participants aged from 3 to 5 years old(61 boys and 63 girls) were asked to judge five emotions(happiness,fear,anger,sadness and neutral) of a man and a woman from cues that conveyed by expressing neutrally semantic sentences in different prosody.Results indicated that the ability of identifying vocal emotions of anger,fear,and neutrality developed with age in preschool period.Happiness was the easiest emotion to be identified,while fear was the most difficult one.All participants scored higher in perceiving a woman's vocal cues than those of a man's.Experiment 2 was aimed at further examining which cue children would rely on to identify the emotion of the speaker if the prosody and semantic cues were contradictory(e.g.a happy event was expressed with sad prosody cue).Participants consisted of 129 children aged from 3 to 5 years old(66 boys and 63 girls).Results showed that all the participants were more inclined to focus on the prosody.It is important to understand the developmental trajectory of understanding vocal emotions in preschoolers.Finding out more about typical patterns of children's early emotion understanding abilities is beneficial for child education,especially for designing early interventions for atypical children,such as children with cochlear implants or hearing aids and with autism.

Emotional prosody rarely affects the spatial distribution of visual attention

Emotional manipulations have been demonstrated to produce leftward shifts in perceptual asymmetries. However, much of this research has used linguistic tasks to assess perceptual asymmetry and there are therefore two interpretations of the leftward shift. It may reflect a leftward shift in the spatial distribution of attention as a consequence of emotional activation of the right hemisphere; alternatively it may reflect emotional facilitation of right hemisphere linguistic processing. The current study used two non-linguistic attention tasks to determine whether emotional prosody influences the spatial distribution of visual attention. In a dual-task paradigm participants listened to semantically neutral sentences in neutral, happy or sad prosodies while completing a target discrimination task (Experiment 1) and a target detection task (Experiments 2 and 3). There was only one condition in one experiment that induced perceptual asymmetries that interacted with emotional prosody, suggesting that task-irrelevant emotional prosody only rarely directs attention. Instead a more likely cause of the leftward perceptual shift for comprehension of emotional speech is facilitation of right hemisphere linguistic processing.

Sex differences in the recognition of emotional prosody in late childhood and adolescence

We examined sex-related differences in the ability to recognize emotional prosody in late childhood (9-12 year olds) and adolescence (13-15 year olds) in relation to salivary testosterone levels. In order to examine both the accuracy and the sensitivity in labeling emotional prosody expressions, five intensities (20, 40, 60, 80, and 100%) for each of three emotion categories were used as stimuli. Totals of 25 male and 22 female children and 28 male and 28 female adolescents were tested on their recognition of happy, angry and sad prosody at the different intensities. The results showed that adolescent females were more sensitive to happy and sad prosody than males but not to angry prosody, whereas there were no sex-related differences in emotional prosody in late childhood for any of the emotional categories. Furthermore, salivary testosterone levels were higher in males than females in adolescence, but not in late childhood, suggesting that the sex differences for emotional prosody recognition emerges in adolescence during which testosterone levels become higher in males than females.

Language comprehension influenced by emotional context: an MEG study

Event Abstract Back to Event Language comprehension influenced by emotional context: an MEG study Aya Ihara1*, Qiang Wei1, Ayumu Matani2, Norio FujiMaki1, Haruko Yagura1, Takeshi Nogai1 and Tsutomu Murata1 1 National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan 2 University of Tokyo , Japan To clarify the neural basis of language comprehension dependent on emotional context, we performed MEG experiments using a cross-modal priming paradigm with an auditorily presented prime and a visually presented target. The primes were the names of people, e.g., “Aoki-san” (English translation: “Mr./Ms. Aoki”), which were spoken with happy, neutral, or sad prosody. The targets were interrogative one-word sentences that consisted of a verb, e.g., “hashiru?” (English translation: “run?”), with emotionally neutral content or a pseudo-verb, e.g., “kazebu?” (pronounceable but not comprehensible). Subjects (n =10) were instructed to read the target sentences silently as the sequel of the prime voices, and to judge whether the targets included a verb or pseudo-verb. We measured the neural activities during silent reading of the targets presented in an emotional context (i.e., Happy, Neutral, or Sad condition) by using MEG. Two conditional differences dependent on the emotional context were found: the Happy and Sad conditions produced less activity than the Neutral condition in the right posterior inferior and middle frontal cortices from 300 to 450 ms; the Happy and Neutral conditions produced greater activity than the Sad condition in the left posterior inferior frontal cortex from 350 to 500 ms, and in the left anterior medial temporal lobe from 400 to 500 ms. These results suggest that the use of emotional context stored in the right frontal cortex starts at approximately 300 ms, that integration of the linguistic information with the emotional context starts at approximately 350 ms in the left frontotemporal cortex, and that language comprehension dependent on the emotional context is achieved by approximately 500 ms. Conference: Biomag 2010 - 17th International Conference on Biomagnetism , Dubrovnik, Croatia, 28 Mar - 1 Apr, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Language Citation: Ihara A, Wei Q, Matani A, FujiMaki N, Yagura H, Nogai T and Murata T (2010). Language comprehension influenced by emotional context: an MEG study. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Biomag 2010 - 17th International Conference on Biomagnetism . doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.06.00257 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 01 Apr 2010; Published Online: 01 Apr 2010. * Correspondence: Aya Ihara, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Kobe, Japan, ihara@po.nict.go.jp Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Aya Ihara Qiang Wei Ayumu Matani Norio FujiMaki Haruko Yagura Takeshi Nogai Tsutomu Murata Google Aya Ihara Qiang Wei Ayumu Matani Norio FujiMaki Haruko Yagura Takeshi Nogai Tsutomu Murata Google Scholar Aya Ihara Qiang Wei Ayumu Matani Norio FujiMaki Haruko Yagura Takeshi Nogai Tsutomu Murata PubMed Aya Ihara Qiang Wei Ayumu Matani Norio FujiMaki Haruko Yagura Takeshi Nogai Tsutomu Murata Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Once more with feeling: The effects of emotional prosody on hemispheric specialisation for linguistic processing

Speech perception requires a bilateral network of neural systems, with the left hemisphere specialised for linguistic processes including phonology, and the right hemisphere specialised for paralinguistic processes including emotional prosody. The present study used dichotic listening to determine how these two processing systems interact. Experiment 1 confirmed that the left hemisphere was specialised for the linguistic task, and the right hemisphere was specialised for the prosodic task. In Experiment 2, participants performed the linguistic task, but the words were spoken in prosodies that were neutral, happy, angry, or sad. Although the emotional prosody was irrelevant for the task, there was an attenuation of the typical right ear advantage when words were spoken with sad prosody, suggesting greater right hemisphere contributions to linguistic processing for sad speech. Similar effects were not observed with angry or happy prosody, suggesting that emotional prosody per se does not facilitate right hemisphere linguistic processing. Results are interpreted in terms of both psychoacoustic and emotion-specific theories of hemispheric specialisation.

On the role of attention for the processing of emotions in speech: Sex differences revisited

In a previous cross-modal priming study [A. Schirmer, A.S. Kotz, A.D. Friederici, Sex differentiates the role of emotional prosody during word processing, Cogn. Brain Res. 14 (2002) 228–233.], we found that women integrated emotional prosody and word valence earlier than men. Both sexes showed a smaller N400 in the event-related potential to emotional words when these words were preceded by a sentence with congruous compared to incongruous emotional prosody. However, women showed this effect with a 200-ms interval between prime sentence and target word whereas men showed the effect with a 750-ms interval. The present study was designed to determine whether these sex differences prevail when attention is directed towards the emotional content of prosody and word meaning. To this end, we presented the same prime sentences and target words as in our previous study. Sentences were spoken with happy or sad prosody and followed by a congruous or incongruous emotional word or pseudoword. The interval between sentence offset and target onset was 200 ms. In addition to performing a lexical decision, participants were asked to decide whether or not a word matched the emotional prosody of the preceding sentence. The combined lexical and congruence judgment failed to reveal differences in emotional-prosodic priming between men and women. Both sexes showed smaller N400 amplitudes to emotionally congruent compared to incongruent words. This suggests that the presence of sex differences in emotional-prosodic priming depends on whether or not participants are instructed to take emotional prosody into account.

Acoustical analysis of posed prosodic expressions: effects of emotion and sex.

Prosodic expression is an important channel of emotional communication and can be assessed through computerized acoustical analysis. Fundamental frequency (F0) is the most commonly studied acoustic measure and considered the best index of perceived pitch. In this study, we examined two factors that can influence prosodic expression, sex and emotion type. A special feature is the use of a neutral expression as a control measure. We also described procedures for eliciting posed prosodic expression via an experimental task from the New York Emotion Battery. Subjects were healthy men (n=10) and women (n=9), matched for age (M=29.2 yr.) and education (M=15.6 yr.). Subjects were asked to intone neutral-content sentences with happy, sad, and neutral prosody. F0 mean and standard deviation were measured using the Computerized Speech Lab program. Initial findings indicated that women produced significantly higher F0 values than did men and that happy sentences were produced with significantly higher F0 values than were sad sentences. When semitone conversions were applied and neutral prosody was subtracted out, differences remained for emotion type but not for sex. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for the assessment and treatment of prosody in clinical populations.