Effects of prosodic emotional intensity on activation of associative auditory cortex.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to investigate hemodynamic responses to adjectives pronounced in happy and angry intonations of varying emotional intensity. In separate sessions, participants judged the emotional valence of either intonation or semantics. To disentangle effects of emotional prosodic intensity from confounding acoustic parameters, mean and variability of volume and fundamental frequency of each stimulus were included as nuisance variables in the statistical models. A linear dependency between hemodynamic responses and emotional intensity of happy and angry intonations was found in the bilateral superior temporal sulcus during both tasks, indicating that increases of hemodynamic responses in this region are elicited by both positive and negative prosody independent of low-level acoustic properties and task instructions.
Ethofer
Thomas
T
Section of Experimental MR of the CNS, Department of Neuroradiology, University of Tuebingen, Tuebingen, Germany. Thomas.Ethofer@med.uni-tuebingen.de
Anders
Silke
S
Wiethoff
Sarah
S
Erb
Michael
M
Herbert
Cornelia
C
Saur
Ralf
R
Grodd
Wolfgang
W
Wildgruber
Dirk
D
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000098:blood supply / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D010100:Oxygen / Q000097:blood; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*
D010100:Oxygen