Infants attend longer to controlling versus supportive directive speech.

Directive communications play a critical role in infants' and young children's daily routines as they are regularly guided by close others. An extensive literature describes two ways of directing action: autonomy support and control. These motivational qualities are thought to be especially important to development as they shape well-being, learning, and exploration. The way in which such motivations are communicated through tone of voice may be especially important for preverbal infants, who respond to tone more than words. Currently, there is little understanding of what role these motivational qualities expressed through tone of voice play in directive speech. To fill this gap in our understanding, we conducted an experiment with 39 infants ranging in age from 9 to 12 months. Infants were presented with validated directive phrases previously recorded by current day-care staff members in autonomy-supportive or controlling tones. Results showed that infants attended longer to controlling tones than to autonomy-supportive tones, evidencing their ability to discriminate between motivational qualities at this early age. Implications for early learning and well-being are discussed.

Emotional Communication in Long-Term Abstained Alcoholics.

BACKGROUND: Alcoholism is associated with difficulties in perceiving emotions through nonverbal channels including prosody. The question whether these difficulties persist to long-term abstinence has, however, received little attention. METHODS: In a 2-part investigation, emotional prosody production was investigated in long-term abstained alcoholics and age- and education-matched healthy controls. First, participants were asked to produce semantically neutral sentences in different emotional tones of voice. Samples were then acoustically analyzed. Next, naïve listeners were asked to recognize the emotional intention of speakers from a randomly collected subset. Voice quality indicators were also assessed by the listeners. RESULTS: Findings revealed emotional prosody production differences between the 2 groups. Differences were particularly apparent when looking at pitch use. Alcoholics' mean and variability of pitch differed significantly from controls' use. The use of loudness was affected to a lesser extent. Crucially, naïve raters confirmed that the intended emotion was more difficult to recognize from exemplars produced by alcoholics. Differences between the 2 groups were also found with regard to voice quality. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that emotional communication difficulties can persist long after alcoholics have quit drinking.

Cross-cultural emotional prosody recognition: evidence from Chinese and British listeners.

This cross-cultural study of emotional tone of voice recognition tests the in-group advantage hypothesis (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002) employing a quasi-balanced design. Individuals of Chinese and British background were asked to recognise pseudosentences produced by Chinese and British native speakers, displaying one of seven emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happy, neutral tone of voice, sad, and surprise). Findings reveal that emotional displays were recognised at rates higher than predicted by chance; however, members of each cultural group were more accurate in recognising the displays communicated by a member of their own cultural group than a member of the other cultural group. Moreover, the evaluation of error matrices indicates that both culture groups relied on similar mechanism when recognising emotional displays from the voice. Overall, the study reveals evidence for both universal and culture-specific principles in vocal emotion recognition.

Teachers' motivational prosody: A pre-registered experimental test of children's reactions to tone of voice used by teachers.

BACKGROUND: Teachers' behaviours drive motivational climates that shape children's engagement and well-being in the classroom, but few studies examine how specific teachers' behaviours such as wording, body language, or voice contribute to these outcomes in isolation of one another. AIMS: This pre-registered experiment sought to examine the often-forgotten role that teachers' tone of voice plays in children's education. Informed by the theoretical framework of self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness, 2017), conditions manipulated controlling (pressuring, demanding), autonomy-supportive (inviting of choice), or motivationally neutral, tones of voice to explore their effects on children's self-reported psychological needs satisfaction, well-being, intention to self-disclose to and intention to cooperate with their teacher. SAMPLE AND METHOD: Children aged 10-16 years (n = 250) heard pre-recorded teachers' voices holding sentence content and speakers constant across conditions, but varying tones of voice. RESULTS: We hypothesized a-priori and found that when children heard controlling sounding voices, they anticipated lower basic psychological need satisfaction, well-being, and intention to disclose to teachers, as compared to neutral-sounding voices. We also anticipated beneficial effects for autonomy-supportive versus neutral voices, but pre-registered analyses did not support these expectations. Intention to cooperate with teachers did not differ across conditions. Supporting relational motivation theory (RMT; Deci & Ryan, Human Motivation and Interpersonal Relationships, 2014), exploratory analyses showed that hearing autonomy-supportive sounding voices increased autonomy and relatedness need satisfactions (but not competence need satisfaction), and through doing so indirectly related to beneficial outcomes (well-being, intention to cooperate and self-disclose). CONCLUSION: In summary, tones of voice seem to play an important role in shaping teachers' impact on their students.

How neurotypical listeners recognize emotions expressed through vocal cues by speakers with high-functioning autism.

We conducted an investigation to explore how neurotypical (NT) listeners perceive the emotional tone of voice in sentences spoken by individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and NT speakers. The investigation included both male and female speakers from both groups. In Study 1, NT listeners were asked to identify the emotional prosody (anger, fear, happiness, surprise or neutral) conveyed by the speakers. Results revealed that emotional expressions produced by male ASD speakers were generally less accurately recognized compared to male NT speakers. In contrast, emotions expressed by female ASD speakers were more accurately categorized compared to female NT speakers, except when expressing fear. This suggests that female ASD speakers may not express emotional prosody in the same way as their male counterparts. In Study 2, a subset of produced materials was rated for valence, voice modulation, and voice control to supplement Study 1 results: Female ASD speakers sounded less negative when expressing fear compared to female NT speakers. Male ASD speakers were perceived as less positive than NT speakers when expressing happiness. Voice modulation also differed between groups, showing a tendency for ASD speakers to follow different display rules for both positive emotions (happiness and surprise) tested. Finally, male ASD speakers were rated to use voice cues less appropriately compared to NT male speakers, an effect less pronounced for female ASD speakers. Together, the results imply that difficulties in social interactions among individuals with high-functioning ASD could be due to non-prototypical voice use of male ASD speakers and emphasize that female individuals do not show the same effects.

Different stages of emotional prosody processing in healthy ageing-evidence from behavioural responses, ERPs, tDCS, and tRNS.

Past research suggests that the ability to recognise the emotional intent of a speaker decreases as a function of age. Yet, few studies have looked at the underlying cause for this effect in a systematic way. This paper builds on the view that emotional prosody perception is a multi-stage process and explores which step of the recognition processing line is impaired in healthy ageing using time-sensitive event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Results suggest that early processes linked to salience detection as reflected in the P200 component and initial build-up of emotional representation as linked to a subsequent negative ERP component are largely unaffected in healthy ageing. The two groups show, however, emotional prosody recognition differences: older participants recognise emotional intentions of speakers less well than younger participants do. These findings were followed up by two neuro-stimulation studies specifically targeting the inferior frontal cortex to test if recognition improves during active stimulation relative to sham. Overall, results suggests that neither tDCS nor high-frequency tRNS stimulation at 2mA for 30 minutes facilitates emotional prosody recognition rates in healthy older adults.

Contextual influences of emotional speech prosody on face processing: how much is enough?

The influence of emotional prosody on the evaluation of emotional facial expressions was investigated in an event-related brain potential (ERP) study using a priming paradigm, the facial affective decision task. Emotional prosodic fragments of short (200-msec) and medium (400-msec) duration were presented as primes, followed by an emotionally related or unrelated facial expression (or facial grimace, which does not resemble an emotion). Participants judged whether or not the facial expression represented an emotion. ERP results revealed an N400-like differentiation for emotionally related prime-target pairs when compared with unrelated prime-target pairs. Faces preceded by prosodic primes of medium length led to a normal priming effect (larger negativity for unrelated than for related prime-target pairs), but the reverse ERP pattern (larger negativity for related than for unrelated prime-target pairs) was observed for faces preceded by short prosodic primes. These results demonstrate that brief exposure to prosodic cues can establish a meaningful emotional context that influences related facial processing; however, this context does not always lead to a processing advantage when prosodic information is very short in duration.

Listen to your mother: Motivating tones of voice predict adolescents' reactions to mothers.

Virtually nothing is known about the role that tone of voice may play in motivating interactions. Herein, we use an experimental approach to explore for the first time how the same directive instructions ("Do well at the play") have different effects on adolescents depending on the motivational tone of voice used to convey these instructions. A sample of 1,000 adolescents aged 14-15 years was randomly assigned to hearing semantically identical messages that were expressed by mothers of adolescents with controlling, autonomy-supportive, or neutral tones of voice. Results suggest that the way speakers modulated their voice when intoning the same verbal messages affected adolescents' emotional, relational, and behavioral intention responses. Listening to mothers making motivating statements in an autonomy-supportive, relative to a neutral, tone of voice elicited more positive and less negative emotions, increased closeness, and intentional behavioral engagement among adolescents, while the opposite set of findings emerged when adolescents listened to mothers making motivational statements in a controlling tone of voice. These findings elucidate how mothers' spoken communications can impact adolescents, with implications for the quality of parent-child relationships, adolescents' well-being, and engagement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Now listen to this! Evidence from a cross-spliced experimental design contrasting pressuring and supportive communications.

Motivating communications are a frequent experience within daily life. Recently, it has been found that two types of motivations are spoken with distinct tones of voices: control (pressure) is spoken with a low pitched, loud tone of voice, fast speech rate, and harsh sounding voice quality; autonomy (support) is spoken with a higher pitched, quieter tone of voice and a slower speech rate. These two motivational tones of voice also differentially impact listeners' well-being. Yet, little is known about the brain mechanisms linked to motivational communications. Here, participants were asked to listen to semantically identical sentences spoken in controlling, neutral, or autonomy-supportive prosody. We also presented cross-spliced versions of these sentences for maximum control over information presentation across time. Findings showed listeners quickly detected whether a speaker was providing support, being pressuring, or not using motivating tones at all. Also, listeners who are pressured do not seem to respond anew when a supportive motivational context arises, but those who had been supported are affected by a newly pressuring environment. Findings are discussed in light of motivational and prosody literatures, and in terms of significance for the role of motivational communications on behavior.

Exploring the Effects of Personality Traits on the Perception of Emotions From Prosody.

It has repeatedly been argued that individual differences in personality influence emotion processing, but findings from both the facial and vocal emotion recognition literature are contradictive, suggesting a lack of reliability across studies. To explore this relationship further in a more systematic manner using the Big Five Inventory, we designed two studies employing different research paradigms. Study 1 explored the relationship between personality traits and vocal emotion recognition accuracy while Study 2 examined how personality traits relate to vocal emotion recognition speed. The combined results did not indicate a pairwise linear relationship between self-reported individual differences in personality and vocal emotion processing, suggesting that the continuously proposed influence of personality characteristics on vocal emotion processing might have been overemphasized previously.

Early emotional prosody perception based on different speaker voices.

Decoding verbal and nonverbal emotional expressions is an important part of speech communication. Although various studies have tried to specify the brain regions that underlie different emotions conveyed in speech, few studies have aimed to specify the time course of emotional speech decoding. We used event-related potentials to determine when emotional speech is first differentiated from neutral speech. Participants engaged in an implicit emotional processing task (probe verification) while listening to emotional sentences spoken by a female and a male speaker. Independent of speaker voice, emotional sentences could be differentiated from neutral sentences as early as 200 ms after sentence onset (P200), suggesting rapid emotional decoding.

Functional contributions of the basal ganglia to emotional prosody: evidence from ERPs.

The basal ganglia (BG) have been functionally linked to emotional processing [Pell, M.D., Leonard, C.L., 2003. Processing emotional tone form speech in Parkinson's Disease: a role for the basal ganglia. Cogn. Affec. Behav. Neurosci. 3, 275-288; Pell, M.D., 2006. Cerebral mechanisms for understanding emotional prosody in speech. Brain Lang. 97 (2), 221-234]. However, few studies have tried to specify the precise role of the BG during emotional prosodic processing. Therefore, the current study examined deviance detection in healthy listeners and patients with left focal BG lesions during implicit emotional prosodic processing in an event-related brain potential (ERP)-experiment. In order to compare these ERP responses with explicit judgments of emotional prosody, the same participants were tested in a follow-up recognition task. As previously reported [Kotz, S.A., Paulmann, S., 2007. When emotional prosody and semantics dance cheek to cheek: ERP evidence. Brain Res. 1151, 107-118; Paulmann, S. & Kotz, S.A., 2008. An ERP investigation on the temporal dynamics of emotional prosody and emotional semantics in pseudo- and lexical sentence context. Brain Lang. 105, 59-69], deviance of prosodic expectancy elicits a right lateralized positive ERP component in healthy listeners. Here we report a similar positive ERP correlate in BG-patients and healthy controls. In contrast, BG-patients are significantly impaired in explicit recognition of emotional prosody when compared to healthy controls. The current data serve as first evidence that focal lesions in left BG do not necessarily affect implicit emotional prosodic processing but evaluative emotional prosodic processes as demonstrated in the recognition task. The results suggest that the BG may not play a mandatory role in implicit emotional prosodic processing. Rather, executive processes underlying the recognition task may be dysfunctional during emotional prosodic processing.

An ERP investigation on the temporal dynamics of emotional prosody and emotional semantics in pseudo- and lexical-sentence context.

Previous evidence supports differential event-related brain potential (ERP) responses for emotional prosodic processing and integrative emotional prosodic/semantic processing. While latter process elicits a negativity similar to the well-known N400 component, transitions in emotional prosodic processing elicit a positivity. To further substantiate this evidence, the current investigation utilized lexical-sentences and sentences without lexical content (pseudo-sentences) spoken in six basic emotions by a female and a male speaker. Results indicate that emotional prosodic expectancy violations elicit a right-lateralized positive-going ERP component independent of basic emotional prosodies and speaker voice. In addition, expectancy violations of integrative emotional prosody/semantics elicit a negativity with a whole-head distribution. The current results nicely complement previous evidence, and extend the results by showing the respective effects for a wider range of emotional prosodies independent of lexical content and speaker voice.

How aging affects the recognition of emotional speech.

To successfully infer a speaker's emotional state, diverse sources of emotional information need to be decoded. The present study explored to what extent emotional speech recognition of 'basic' emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, pleasant surprise, sadness) differs between different sex (male/female) and age (young/middle-aged) groups in a behavioural experiment. Participants were asked to identify the emotional prosody of a sentence as accurately as possible. As a secondary goal, the perceptual findings were examined in relation to acoustic properties of the sentences presented. Findings indicate that emotion recognition rates differ between the different categories tested and that these patterns varied significantly as a function of age, but not of sex.

You 'have' to hear this: Using tone of voice to motivate others.

The present studies explored the role of prosody in motivating others, and applied self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000) to do so. Initial studies describe patterns of prosody that discriminate motivational speech. Autonomy support was expressed with lower intensity, slower speech rate and less voice energy in both motivationally laden and neutral (but motivationally primed) sentences. In a follow-up study, participants were able to recognize motivational prosody in semantically neutral sentences, suggesting prosody alone may carry motivational content. Findings from subsequent studies also showed that an autonomy-supportive as compared with a controlling tone facilitated positive personal (perceived choice and lower perceived pressure, well-being) and interpersonal (closeness to others and prosocial behaviors) outcomes commonly linked to this type of motivation. Results inform both the social psychology (in particular motivation) and psycho-linguistic (in particular prosody) literatures and offer a first description of how motivational tone alone can shape listeners' experiences. (PsycINFO Database Record

Morphological encoding beyond slots and fillers: An ERP study of comparative formation in English.

One important organizational property of morphology is competition. Different means of expression are in conflict with each other for encoding the same grammatical function. In the current study, we examined the nature of this control mechanism by testing the formation of comparative adjectives in English during language production. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during cued silent production, the first study of this kind for comparative adjective formation. We specifically examined the ERP correlates of producing synthetic relative to analytic comparatives, e.g. angrier vs. more angry. A frontal, bilaterally distributed, enhanced negative-going waveform for analytic comparatives (vis-a-vis synthetic ones) emerged approximately 300ms after the (silent) production cue. We argue that this ERP effect reflects a control mechanism that constrains grammatically-based computational processes (viz. more comparative formation). We also address the possibility that this particular ERP effect may belong to a family of previously observed negativities reflecting cognitive control monitoring, rather than morphological encoding processes per se.

Dynamic Facial Expressions Prime the Processing of Emotional Prosody.

Evidence suggests that emotion is represented supramodally in the human brain. Emotional facial expressions, which often precede vocally expressed emotion in real life, can modulate event-related potentials (N100 and P200) during emotional prosody processing. To investigate these cross-modal emotional interactions, two lines of research have been put forward: cross-modal integration and cross-modal priming. In cross-modal integration studies, visual and auditory channels are temporally aligned, while in priming studies they are presented consecutively. Here we used cross-modal emotional priming to study the interaction of dynamic visual and auditory emotional information. Specifically, we presented dynamic facial expressions (angry, happy, neutral) as primes and emotionally-intoned pseudo-speech sentences (angry, happy) as targets. We were interested in how prime-target congruency would affect early auditory event-related potentials, i.e., N100 and P200, in order to shed more light on how dynamic facial information is used in cross-modal emotional prediction. Results showed enhanced N100 amplitudes for incongruently primed compared to congruently and neutrally primed emotional prosody, while the latter two conditions did not significantly differ. However, N100 peak latency was significantly delayed in the neutral condition compared to the other two conditions. Source reconstruction revealed that the right parahippocampal gyrus was activated in incongruent compared to congruent trials in the N100 time window. No significant ERP effects were observed in the P200 range. Our results indicate that dynamic facial expressions influence vocal emotion processing at an early point in time, and that an emotional mismatch between a facial expression and its ensuing vocal emotional signal induces additional processing costs in the brain, potentially because the cross-modal emotional prediction mechanism is violated in case of emotional prime-target incongruency.

When emotional prosody and semantics dance cheek to cheek: ERP evidence.

To communicate emotionally entails that a listener understands a verbal message but also the emotional prosody going along with it. So far the time course and interaction of these emotional 'channels' is still poorly understood. The current set of event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments investigated both the interactive time course of emotional prosody with semantics and of emotional prosody independent of emotional semantics using a cross-splicing method. In a probe verification task (Experiment 1) prosodic expectancy violations elicited a positivity, while a combined prosodic-semantic expectancy violation elicited a negativity. Comparable ERP results were obtained in an emotional prosodic categorization task (Experiment 2). The present data support different ERP responses with distinct time courses and topographies elicited as a function of prosodic expectancy and combined prosodic-semantic expectancy during emotional prosodic processing and combined emotional prosody/emotional semantic processing. These differences suggest that the interaction of more than one emotional channel facilitates subtle transitions in an emotional sentence context.

ERP correlates of motivating voices: quality of motivation and time-course matters.

Here, we conducted the first study to explore how motivations expressed through speech are processed in real-time. Participants listened to sentences spoken in two types of well-studied motivational tones (autonomy-supportive and controlling), or a neutral tone of voice. To examine this, listeners were presented with sentences that either signaled motivations through prosody (tone of voice) and words simultaneously (e.g. 'You absolutely have to do it my way' spoken in a controlling tone of voice), or lacked motivationally biasing words (e.g. 'Why don't we meet again tomorrow' spoken in a motivational tone of voice). Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in response to motivations conveyed through words and prosody showed that listeners rapidly distinguished between motivations and neutral forms of communication as shown in enhanced P2 amplitudes in response to motivational when compared with neutral speech. This early detection mechanism is argued to help determine the importance of incoming information. Once assessed, motivational language is continuously monitored and thoroughly evaluated. When compared with neutral speech, listening to controlling (but not autonomy-supportive) speech led to enhanced late potential ERP mean amplitudes, suggesting that listeners are particularly attuned to controlling messages. The importance of controlling motivation for listeners is mirrored in effects observed for motivations expressed through prosody only. Here, an early rapid appraisal, as reflected in enhanced P2 amplitudes, is only found for sentences spoken in controlling (but not autonomy-supportive) prosody. Once identified as sounding pressuring, the message seems to be preferentially processed, as shown by enhanced late potential amplitudes in response to controlling prosody. Taken together, results suggest that motivational and neutral language are differentially processed; further, the data suggest that listening to cues signaling pressure and control cannot be ignored and lead to preferential, and more in-depth processing mechanisms.

Early and late brain signatures of emotional prosody among individuals with high versus low power.

Using ERPs, we explored the relationship between social power and emotional prosody processing. In particular, we investigated differences at early and late processing stages between individuals primed with high or low power. Comparable to previously published findings from nonprimed participants, individuals primed with low power displayed differentially modulated P2 amplitudes in response to different emotional prosodies, whereas participants primed with high power failed to do so. Similarly, participants primed with low power showed differentially modulated amplitudes in response to different emotional prosodies at a later processing stage (late ERP component), whereas participants primed with high power did not. These ERP results suggest that high versus low power leads to emotional prosody processing differences at the early stage associated with emotional salience detection and at a later stage associated with more in-depth processing of emotional stimuli.