title: More than words (and faces): evidence for a Stroop effect of prosody in emotion word processing.
abstract: Humans typically combine linguistic and nonlinguistic information to comprehend emotions. We adopted an emotion identification Stroop task to investigate how different channels interact in emotion communication. In experiment 1, synonyms of "happy" and "sad" were spoken with happy and sad prosody. Participants had more difficulty ignoring prosody than ignoring verbal content. In experiment 2, synonyms of "happy" and "sad" were spoken with happy and sad prosody, while happy or sad faces were displayed. Accuracy was lower when two channels expressed an emotion that was incongruent with the channel participants had to focus on, compared with the cross-channel congruence condition. When participants were required to focus on verbal content, accuracy was significantly lower also when prosody was incongruent with verbal content and face. This suggests that prosody biases emotional verbal content processing, even when conflicting with verbal content and face simultaneously. Implications for multimodal communication and language evolution studies are discussed.
authors.affiliation: a Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , Vrije Universiteit Brussel , Brussels , Belgium.|b Center for Mind, Brain and Cognitive Evolution , Ruhr-University Bochum , Bochum , Germany.
authors.forename: Piera
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Filippi
authors.affiliation: c Department of Biopsychology , Ruhr-University Bochum , Bochum , Germany.
authors.forename: Sebastian
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ocklenburg
authors.affiliation: d Department of Cognitive Biology , University of Vienna , Vienna , Austria.
authors.forename: Daniel L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Bowling
authors.affiliation: e Department of General and Biological Psychology , University of Wuppertal , Wuppertal , Germany.
authors.forename: Larissa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Heege
authors.affiliation: b Center for Mind, Brain and Cognitive Evolution , Ruhr-University Bochum , Bochum , Germany.|c Department of Biopsychology , Ruhr-University Bochum , Bochum , Germany.
authors.forename: Onur
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Güntürkün
authors.affiliation: b Center for Mind, Brain and Cognitive Evolution , Ruhr-University Bochum , Bochum , Germany.|f Institute of Philosophy II , Ruhr-University Bochum , Bochum , Germany.
authors.forename: Albert
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Newen
authors.affiliation: a Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , Vrije Universiteit Brussel , Brussels , Belgium.
authors.forename: Bart
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: de Boer
mesh_terms: D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D013067:Speech Perception; D057190:Stroop Test; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Stroop task; emotion; language evolution; multimodal communication; prosody