Neuropsychological correlates of evocative multimodal speech: The combined roles of fearful prosody, visuospatial attention, cortisol response, and anxiety.

Past research reveals left-hemisphere dominance for linguistic processing and right-hemisphere dominance for emotional prosody processing during auditory language comprehension, a pattern also found in visuospatial attention studies where listeners are presented with a view of the talker's face. Is this lateralization pattern for visuospatial attention and language processing upheld when listeners are experiencing a stress response? To investigate this question, participants completed the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) between administrations of a visuospatial attention and language comprehension dual-task paradigm. Subjective anxiety, cardiovascular, and saliva cortisol measures were taken before and after the TSST. Higher language comprehension scores in the post-TSST neutral prosody condition were associated with lower cortisol responses, differences in blood pressure, and less subjective anxiety. In this challenging task, visuospatial attention was most focused at the mouth region, both prior to and after stress induction. Greater visuospatial attention on the left side of the face image, compared to the right side, indicated greater right hemisphere activation. In the Fear, but not the Neutral, prosody condition, greater cortisol response was associated with greater visuospatial attention to the left side of the face image. Results are placed into theoretical context, and can be applied to situations where stressed listeners must interpret emotionally evocative language.