Perceived prolonged stress leads to difficulties in recognizing sadness from voice cues in men but not women.

It has long been known that stress has detrimental effects on cognition (e.g., Alderson & Novack, 2002; Lupien & Lepage, 2001), most notably documented for memory functions (e.

The effect of sexual orientation on voice acoustic properties.

Introduction: Previous research has investigated sexual orientation differences in the acoustic properties of individuals' voices, often theorizing that homosexuals of both sexes would have voice properties mirroring those of heterosexuals of the opposite sex. Findings were mixed, but many of these studies have methodological limitations including small sample sizes, use of recited passages instead of natural speech, or grouping bisexual and homosexual participants together for analyses.

Methods: To address these shortcomings, the present study examined a wide range of acoustic properties in the natural voices of 142 men and 175 women of varying sexual orientations, with sexual orientation treated as a continuous variable throughout.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 while Study 2 examined how personality traits relate to vocal emotion .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How Psychological Stress Affects Emotional Prosody.

We explored how experimentally induced psychological stress affects the production and recognition of vocal emotions. In Study 1a, we demonstrate that sentences spoken by stressed speakers are judged by naïve listeners as sounding more stressed than sentences uttered by non-stressed speakers. In Study 1b, negative emotions produced by stressed speakers are generally less well recognized than the same emotions produced by non-stressed speakers.

Perceived Comfort and Blinding Efficacy in Randomised Sham-Controlled Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) Trials at 2 mA in Young and Older Healthy Adults.

Background: tDCS studies typically find that: lowest levels of comfort occur at stimulation-onset; young adult participants experience less comfort than older participants; and participants' blinding seems effective at low current strengths. At 2 mA conflicting results have been reported, questioning the effectiveness of blinding in sham-controlled paradigms using higher current strengths. Investigator blinding is rarely reported.

Impaired neural processing of dynamic faces in left-onset Parkinson's disease.

Parkinson's disease (PD) affects patients beyond the motor domain. According to previous evidence, one mechanism that may be impaired in the disease is face processing. However, few studies have investigated this process at the neural level in PD.

Social power and recognition of emotional prosody: High power is associated with lower recognition accuracy than low power.

Listeners have to pay close attention to a speaker's tone of voice (prosody) during daily conversations. This is particularly important when trying to infer the emotional state of the speaker. Although a growing body of research has explored how emotions are processed from speech in general, little is known about how psychosocial factors such as social power can shape the perception of vocal emotional attributes.

More than accuracy: Nonverbal dialects modulate the time course of vocal emotion recognition across cultures.

Using a gating paradigm, this study investigated the nature of the in-group advantage in vocal emotion recognition by comparing 2 distinct cultures. Pseudoutterances conveying 4 basic emotions, expressed in English and Hindi, were presented to English and Hindi listeners. In addition to hearing full utterances, each stimulus was gated from its onset to construct 5 processing intervals to pinpoint when the in-group advantage emerges, and whether this differs when listening to a foreign language (English participants judging Hindi) or a second language (Hindi participants judging English).

Producing morphologically complex words: an ERP study with children and adults.

A widely studied morphological phenomenon in psycholinguistic research is the plurals-inside-compounds effect in English, which is the avoidance of regular plural modifiers within compounds (e.g., *rats hunter).

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.

Valence, arousal, and task effects in emotional prosody processing.

Previous research suggests that emotional prosody processing is a highly rapid and complex process. In particular, it has been shown that different basic emotions can be differentiated in an early event-related brain potential (ERP) component, the P200. Often, the P200 is followed by later long lasting ERPs such as the late positive complex.

Brain potentials during language production in children and adults: an ERP study of the English past tense.

The current study examines the neural correlates of 8-to-12-year-old children and adults producing inflected word forms, specifically regular vs. irregular past-tense forms in English, using a silent production paradigm. ERPs were time-locked to a visual cue for silent production of either a regular or irregular past-tense form or a 3rd person singular present tense form of a given verb (e.

An ERP study of vocal emotion processing in asymmetric Parkinson's disease.

Parkinson's disease (PD) has been related to impaired processing of emotional speech intonation (emotional prosody). One distinctive feature of idiopathic PD is motor symptom asymmetry, with striatal dysfunction being strongest in the hemisphere contralateral to the most affected body side. It is still unclear whether this asymmetry may affect vocal emotion perception.