Valence-specific laterality effects in vocal emotion: interactions with stimulus type, blocking and sex

Valence-specific laterality effects have been frequently obtained in facial emotion perception but not in vocal emotion perception. We report a dichotic listening study further examining whether valence-specific laterality effects generalise to vocal emotions. Based on previous literature, we tested whether valence-specific laterality effects were dependent on blocked presentation of the emotion conditions, on the naturalness of the emotional stimuli, or on listener sex. We presented happy and sad sentences, paired with neutral counterparts, dichotically in an emotion localisation task, with vocal stimuli being preceded by verbal labels indicating target emotions. The measure was accuracy. When stimuli of the same emotion were presented as a block, a valence-specific laterality effect was demonstrated, but only in original stimuli and not morphed stimuli. There was a separate interaction with listener sex. We interpret our findings as suggesting that the valence-specific laterality hypothesis is supported only in certain circumstances. We discuss modulating factors, and we consider whether the mechanisms underlying those factors may be attentional or experiential in nature.     

Differences in adult and adolescent listeners’ ratings of valence and arousal in emotional prosody

ABSTRACT

Judgments of emotional stimuli’s valence and arousal can differ based on the perceiver’s age. With most of the existing literature on age-related changes in such ratings based on perceptions of visually-presented pictures or words, less is known about how youth and adults perceive and rate the affective information contained in auditory emotional stimuli. The current study examined age-related differences in adolescent (n?=?31; 45% female; aged 12–17, M?=?14.35, SD?=?1.68) and adult listeners’ (n?=?30; 53% female; aged 21–30, M?=?26.20 years, SD?=?2.98) ratings of the valence and arousal of spoken words conveying happiness, anger, and a neutral expression. We also fitted closed curves to the average ratings for each emotional expression to determine their relative position on the valence-arousal plane of an affective circumplex. Compared to adults, adolescents’ ratings of emotional prosody were generally higher in valence, but more constricted in range for both valence and arousal. This pattern of ratings is suggestive of lesser differentiation amongst emotional categories’ holistic properties, which may have implications for the successful recognition and appropriate response to vocal emotional cues in adolescents’ social environments.     

Attentional bias towards angry faces is moderated by the activation of a social processing mode in the general population

ABSTRACT

Dot-probe studies usually find an attentional bias towards threatening stimuli only in anxious participants, but not in non-anxious participants. In the present study, we conducted two experiments to investigate whether attentional bias towards angry faces in unselected samples is moderated by the extent to which the current task requires social processing. In Experiment 1, participants performed a dot-probe task involving classification of either socially meaningful targets (schematic faces) or meaningless targets (scrambled schematic faces). Targets were preceded by two photographic face cues, one angry and one neutral. Angry face cues only produced significant cueing scores (i.e. faster target responses if the target replaced the angry face compared to the neutral face) with socially meaningful targets, not with meaningless targets. In Experiment 2, participants classified only meaningful targets, which were either socially meaningful (schematic faces) or not (schematic houses). Again, mean cueing scores were significantly moderated by the social character of the targets. However, cueing scores in this experiment were non-significant in the social target condition and significantly negative in the non-social target condition. These results suggest that attentional bias towards angry faces in the dot-probe task is moderated by the activation of a social processing mode in unselected samples.     

情绪韵律调节情绪词识别的ERP研究

采用韵律/词汇干扰范式和延迟匹配任务, 通过两个ERP实验, 考察了汉语口语中情绪韵律能否、以及如何调节情绪词的识别。实验一中, 不同类型的情绪韵律分组呈现, ERP结果显示, 同与情绪韵律效价一致的情绪词相比, 与情绪韵律效价不一致的情绪词诱发了走向更负的P200、N300和N400成分; 实验二中, 不同类型的情绪韵律随机呈现, 上述效价一致性效应依然存在。实验结果表明, 情绪韵律能够调节情绪词识别, 主要表现在对情绪词的音韵编码和语义加工的双重易化上。     

The relationship between prosody and breathing in spontaneous discourse

This article is concerned with the role of prosody in discourse. Three experiments explored the relationship between inspiration, declination, and syntactic boundaries in normal and RHD participants. Fundamental frequency and intensity were measured at the beginning and end of breath units excised from conversational samples. The results revealed evidence of declination of intensity in all samples measured. However, resetting of fundamental frequency was observed only in the samples of normal participants and then only when a breath coincided with the beginning of a sentence. The results suggest that resetting and declination play separate roles in discourse parsing.     

The prosodic property of lexical stress affects eye movements during silent reading

The present study examined lexical stress in the context of silent reading by measuring eye movements. We asked whether lexical stress registers in the eye movement record and, if so, why. The study also tested the implicit prosody hypothesis, or the idea that readers construct a prosodic contour during silent reading. Participants read high and low frequency target words with one or two stressed syllables embedded in sentences. Lexical stress affected eye movements, such that words with two stressed syllables took longer to read and received more fixations than words with one stressed syllable. Findings offer empirical support for the implicit prosody hypothesis and suggest that stress assignment may be the completing phase of lexical access, at least in terms of eye movement control.     

Recycling prosodic boundaries

The present study investigates the role of prosodic structure in selecting a syntactic analysis at different stages of parsing in silent reading of Japanese relative clauses. Experiments 1 and 2 (sentence-completion questionnaires) revealed an effect of the length of the sentence-initial constituent on the resolution of a clause boundary ambiguity in Japanese. Experiment 3 (fragment-reading) showed that this length manipulation is also reflected in prosodic phrasing in speech. Its influence on ambiguity resolution is attributed to recycling of prosodic boundaries established during the first-pass parse. This explanation is based on the implicit prosody proposals of Bader (1998) and Fodor (1998). Experiment 4 (self-paced reading) demonstrated the immediacy of the influence on ambiguity resolution on-line. Experiment 5 (self-paced reading) found support for the additional prediction that when no boundary is available to be recycled, processing the relative clause construction is more difficult.     

The Angry Patient: Case and Session Presentation

Responding to patients who become angry at the therapist is difficult for many clinicians. In the case and session presented, the patient is not only angry, but devalues the therapist by not paying while asking for more frequent sessions. The therapist loses it, states she is angry, and remains insistent on the patient keeping his bills paid or reducing the frequency of sessions. The therapist is conflicted over confronting the patient with what she believes has to change in order for his symptoms to diminish—the irrational beliefs, life style, and sense of entitlement related to the personality disorder of this patient, but likely to drive him away from treatment. The therapist engages in a risky confrontation and remains unclear about the eventual benefit of this response.     

Newborns are sensitive to multiple cues for word segmentation in continuous speech

Before infants can learn words, they must identify those words in continuous speech. Yet, the speech signal lacks obvious boundary markers, which poses a potential problem for language acquisition (Swingley, Philos Trans R Soc Lond. Series B, Biol Sci 364 (1536), 3617–3632, 2009). By the middle of the first year, infants seem to have solved this problem (Bergelson & Swingley, Proc Natl Acad Sci 109 (9), 3253–3258, 2012; Jusczyk & Aslin, Cogn Psychol 29 , 1–23, 1995), but it is unknown if segmentation abilities are present from birth, or if they only emerge after sufficient language exposure and/or brain maturation. Here, in two independent experiments, we looked at two cues known to be crucial for the segmentation of human speech: the computation of statistical co‐occurrences between syllables and the use of the language's prosody. After a brief familiarization of about 3 min with continuous speech, using functional near‐infrared spectroscopy, neonates showed differential brain responses on a recognition test to words that violated either the statistical (Experiment 1) or prosodic (Experiment 2) boundaries of the familiarization, compared to words that conformed to those boundaries. Importantly, word recognition in Experiment 2 occurred even in the absence of prosodic information at test, meaning that newborns encoded the phonological content independently of its prosody. These data indicate that humans are born with operational language processing and memory capacities and can use at least two types of cues to segment otherwise continuous speech, a key first step in language acquisition.