Effect of Affective Speech Prosody in Instruction: an ERP Study
International Journal of Psychology. Vol.59, No.1 2024
Anita Zdanoviča, Baiba Trinīte, Jurģis Šķilters, Daiga Kurme, Evija Lavrane, Ilva Magazeina-Līduma, Chie Nakatani

Emotional salience of stimulus influences both neural information processing and behavior, with a notable emphasis on prioritizing threat-related or angry stimuli, most likely due to evolutionary benefits. Faster response time (RT) was reported to angry compared to neutral visual stimulus (Calvo & Nummenmaa, 2016; Valk et al., 2015). Moreover, event-related potentials (ERPs), namely, late positive potential (LPP) increased the amplitude both to visual- (Stolz et al., 2019) and auditory stimuli (Pell et al., 2015). Prosody carries a significant amount of emotional information in our everyday life, e.g., ‘angry’ prosody to warn a danger, however, auditory studies have been the minority. The current study controlled the confounds between emotional and physical parameters of stimuli to investigate pure emotional effects of affective speech prosody on behavioral and ERP measures. Forty-five healthy Latvian-speaking individuals followed auditory instructions in Latvian and moved a joystick button in an instructed direction (right, left, up, or down). The instructions were recorded by ten professional Latvian female and male actors in angry, happy, and neutral voice. To select appropriate stimuli for ERP study, arousal and valence of instructions was rated by naïve listeners. The highest-rated angry stimuli were longer than happy and neutral ones. To avoid confounding between the physical and emotional effects, trials were blocked as 16 Angry- followed by 8 Neutral trials (AN) and 16 Happy- followed by 8 Neutral ones (HN). The repeated emotional instructions let the emotional effect to carry over to the following neutral trials which were physically identical in AN and HN conditions. RT and ERPs of the neutral trials were analyzed to estimate pure carry-over effect of emotional prosody. Neutral instructions in the AN block were executed significantly faster than those in the HN block. Complex results in ERPs including LPP will be reported.


Keywords
affective prosody, emotions, vocal instructions

Zdanoviča, A., Trinīte, B., Šķilters, J., Kurme, D., Lavrane, E., Magazeina-Līduma, I., Nakatani, C. Effect of Affective Speech Prosody in Instruction: an ERP Study. International Journal of Psychology, 2024, Vol. 59, No. 1, pp.456-457. ISSN 0020-7594. e-ISSN 1464-066X.

Publication language
English (en)
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