There's more to emotion than meets the eye: A processing bias for neutral content in the domain of emotional prosody

Abstract

Research on emotion processing in the visual modality suggests a processing advantage for emotionally salient stimuli, even at early sensory stages; however, results concerning the auditory correlates are inconsistent. We present two experiments that employed a gating paradigm to investigate emotional prosody. In Experiment 1, participants heard successively building segments of Jabberwocky “sentences” spoken with happy, angry, or neutral intonation. After each segment, participants indicated the emotion conveyed and rated their confidence in their decision. Participants in Experiment 2 also heard Jabberwocky “sentences” in successive increments, with half discriminating happy from neutral prosody, and half discriminating angry from neutral prosody. Participants in both experiments identified neutral prosody more rapidly and accurately than happy or angry prosody. Confidence ratings were greater for neutral sentences, and error patterns also indicated a bias for recognising neutral prosody. Taken together, results suggest that enhanced processing of emotional content may be constrained by stimulus modality.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• Emotional prosody
• Auditory emotion processing
• Emotion bias

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to the first author and NIH grants (DC00494 and DC03885) to the last author. Lauren Cornew is now in the Department of Radiology at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

We thank Jessica Belisle, Teresa Lee, and Chris Lonner for assistance with data collection, Sarah Callahan for assistance during manuscript preparation, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Notes

¹At the time of recording, it was felt that preservation of the naturalistic components of the speech samples was critical for this experiment. The differences in sentence length are considered in the analyses (see results).

²The term “isolation point” was borrowed from the spoken word recognition literature, in the context of which the gating paradigm was initially developed. It is expected that there will be considerable individual differences in participants’ identification of emotional prosody. Those individual differences, coupled with the longer stimulus durations of full sentences compared to single words, will likely lead to increased variability in isolation points in the current experiments compared to word-recognition studies. Nevertheless, the original terminology is retained for methodological consistency.

³Gender differences were not the focus in the current study; however, because they have been observed in some previous studies of emotional prosody processing (e.g., Schirmer et al., 2005), we included gender as a factor in data analyses.