Temporal signatures of processing voiceness and emotion in sound

Abstract This study explored the temporal course of vocal and emotional sound processing. Participants detected rare repetitions in a stimulus stream comprising neutral and surprised non-verbal exclamations and spectrally rotated control sounds. Spectral rotation preserved some acoustic and emotional properties of the vocal originals. Event-related potentials elicited to unrepeated sounds revealed effects of voiceness and emotion. Relative to non-vocal sounds, vocal sounds elicited a larger centro-parietally distributed N1. This effect was followed by greater positivity to vocal relative to non-vocal sounds beginning with the P2 and extending throughout the recording epoch (N4, late positive potential) with larger amplitudes in female than in male listeners. Emotion effects overlapped with the voiceness effects but were smaller and differed topographically. Voiceness and emotion interacted only for the late positive potential, which was greater for vocal-emotional as compared with all other sounds. Taken together, these results point to a multi-stage process in which voiceness and emotionality are represented independently before being integrated in a manner that biases responses to stimuli with socio-emotional relevance.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

• Publication date

  2017-02-17

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/scan/nsx020PMID 28338796PMCID 5472162
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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