The cortical processing of perceived emotion: a DC-potential study on affective speech prosody.
Direct current (DC) components of the EEG signal were recorded in 16 right-handed subjects during presentation of pairs of declarative sentences with either happy, sad or neutral intonation. Each stimulus pair had identical wording, but differed at the acoustic level either in pitch (fundamental frequency = FO) range or in duration of stressed syllables. Subjects were asked, first, to identify the emotional category of each sentence pair and, second, to indicate the utterance displaying stronger emotional expressiveness. Stimuli with happy or sad intonation, as well as FO-manipulated neutral sentences, yielded a significantly lateralized negativity towards the right hemisphere (RH). Compared with FO-varied neutral utterances, the discrimination of time-manipulated neutral stimuli resulted in significantly reduced amplitudes, predominantly over RH areas. These results corroborate the suggestion of a dominant role of the RH for the evaluation of the emotional significance of sensory input.
Pihan
H
H
Department of Neurology, University of Tübingen, Germany.
Altenmüller
E
E
Ackermann
H
H
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D011037:Poetry as Topic; D013016:Sound; D013060:Speech