Sensing emotion in voices: Negativity bias and gender differences in a validation study of the Oxford Vocal ('OxVoc') sounds database

Roles of Phonation Types and Decoders' Gender in Recognizing Mandarin Emotional Speech

PURPOSE

Capturing phonation types such as breathy, modal, and pressed voices precisely can facilitate the recognition of human emotions. However, little is known about how exactly phonation types and decoders' gender influence the perception of emotional speech. Based on the modified Brunswikian lens model, this article aims to examine the roles of phonation types and decoders' gender in Mandarin emotional speech recognition by virtue of articulatory speech synthesis.

METHOD

Fifty-five participants (28 male and 27 female) completed a recognition task of Mandarin emotional speech, with 200 stimuli representing five emotional categories (happiness, anger, fear, sadness, and neutrality) and five types (original, copied, breathy, modal, and pressed). Repeated-measures analyses of variance were performed to analyze recognition accuracy and confusion data.

RESULTS

For male and female decoders, the recognition accuracy of anger from pressed stimuli and fear from breathy stimuli was high; across all phonation-type stimuli, the recognition accuracy of sadness was also high, but that of happiness was low. The confusion data revealed that in recognizing fear from all phonation-type stimuli, female decoders chose fear responses more frequently and neutral responses less frequently than male decoders. In recognizing neutrality from breathy stimuli, female decoders significantly reduced their choice of neutral responses and misidentified neutrality as anger, while male decoders mistook neutrality from pressed stimuli for anger.

CONCLUSIONS

This study revealed that, in Mandarin, phonation types play crucial roles in recognizing anger, fear, and neutrality, while the recognition of sadness and happiness seems not to depend heavily on phonation types. Moreover, the decoders' gender affects their recognition of neutrality and fear. These findings support the modified Brunswikian lens model and have significance for diagnosis and intervention among clinical populations with hearing impairment or gender-related psychiatric disorders.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.24302221.

A magnetoencephalography study of first-time mothers listening to infant cries

Studies using magnetoencephalography (MEG) have identified the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) to be an important early hub for a “parental instinct” in the brain. This complements the finding from functional magnetic resonance imaging studies linking reward, emotion regulation, empathy, and mentalization networks to the “parental brain.” Here, we used MEG in 43 first-time mothers listening to infant and adult cry vocalizations to investigate the link with mother–infant postpartum bonding scores and their level of sleep deprivation (assessed using both actigraphy and sleep logs). When comparing brain responses to infant versus adult cry vocalizations, we found significant differences at around 800–1,000 ms after stimuli onset in the primary auditory cortex, superior temporal gyrus, hippocampal areas, insula, precuneus supramarginal gyrus, postcentral gyrus, and posterior cingulate gyrus. Importantly, mothers with weaker bonding scores showed decreased brain responses to infant cries in the auditory cortex, middle and superior temporal gyrus, OFC, hippocampal areas, supramarginal gyrus, and inferior frontal gyrus at around 100–300 ms after the stimulus onset. In contrast, we did not find correlations with sleep deprivation scores. The significant decreases in brain processing of an infant’s distress signals could potentially be a novel signature of weaker infant bonding in new mothers and should be investigated in vulnerable populations.

A Scoping Review on the Effects of Emotional Stimuli on Language Processing in People With Aphasia

PURPOSE

Emotional stimuli have been shown to influence language processing (both language comprehension and production) in people with aphasia (PWA); however, this finding is not universally reported. Effects of emotional stimuli on language performance in PWA could have clinical and theoretical implications, yet the sparsity of studies and variability among them make it difficult to appraise the significance of this effect. The purpose of this scoping review was to (a) determine the extent and range of research examining the effect of emotional stimuli on language processing in PWA, (b) summarize and evaluate research findings, and (c) identify gaps in the literature that may warrant future study.

METHOD

PsycINFO, PubMed, Web of Science, and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature databases were systematically searched for articles that compared performance in response to emotional and nonemotional stimuli on at least one language measure in one or more adults with aphasia. Data related to methods and results were extracted from each article and charted in Excel.

RESULTS

Five hundred forty unique articles were found, and 18 articles, consisting of 19 studies, met inclusion/exclusion criteria for this review. Of the 19 studies included, 11 studies reported enhanced performance on a language task for emotional compared to nonemotional stimuli, seven reported no difference, and one reported worse performance for emotional compared to nonemotional stimuli. Possible modulating variables such as task type, measurement, stimulus characteristics, and sample characteristics are discussed along with gaps in the literature.

CONCLUSION

The extent of research in this area is sparse; however, there does appear to be some early evidence for better performance in response to emotional over nonemotional stimuli in PWA for some, but not all, language processes investigated.

The Impact of Depression on Mothers' Neural Processing of Their Adolescents' Affective Behavior

Depression affects neural processing of emotional stimuli and could, therefore, impact parent–child interactions. However, the neural processes with which mothers with depression process their adolescents’ affective interpersonal signals and how this relates to mothers’ parenting behavior are poorly understood. Mothers with and without depression (N = 64 and N = 51, respectively; M_age = 40 years) from low-income families completed an interaction task with their adolescents (M_age = 12.8 years), which was coded for both individuals’ aggressive, dysphoric, positive and neutral affective behavior. While undergoing fMRI, mothers viewed video clips from this task of affective behavior from their own and an unfamiliar adolescent. Relative to non-depressed mothers, those with depression showed more aggressive and less positive affective behavior during the interaction task and more activation in the bilateral insula, superior temporal gyrus and striatum but less in the lateral prefrontal cortex while viewing aggressive and neutral affect. Findings were comparable for own and unfamiliar adolescents’ affect. Heightened limbic, striatal and sensory responses were associated with more aggressive and dysphoric parenting behavior during the interactions, while reduced lateral prefrontal activation was associated with less positive parenting behavior. These results highlight the importance of depressed mothers’ affective information processing for understanding mothers’ behavior during interactions with their adolescents.

Short-term oestrogen as a strategy to prevent postpartum depression in high-risk women: protocol for the double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled MAMA clinical trial

INTRODUCTION

Postpartum depression affects 10%-15% of women and has a recurrence rate of 40% in subsequent pregnancies. Women who develop postpartum depression are suspected to be more sensitive to the rapid and large fluctuations in sex steroid hormones, particularly estradiol, during pregnancy and postpartum. This trial aims to evaluate the preventive effect of 3 weeks transdermal estradiol treatment immediately postpartum on depressive episodes in women at high risk for developing postpartum depression.

METHODS AND ANALYSIS

The Maternal Mental Health Trial is a double-blind, randomised and placebo-controlled clinical trial. The trial involves three departments of obstetrics organised under Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark. Women who are singleton pregnant with a history of perinatal depression are eligible to participate. Participants will be randomised to receive either transdermal estradiol patches (200 µg/day) or placebo patches for 3 weeks immediately postpartum. The primary outcome is clinical depression, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-V criteria of Major Depressive Disorder with onset at any time between 0 and 6 months postpartum. Secondary outcomes include, but are not limited to, symptoms of depression postpartum, exclusive breastfeeding, cortisol dynamics, maternal distress sensitivity and cognitive function. The primary statistical analysis will be performed based on the intention-to-treat principle. With the inclusion of 220 participants and a 20% expected dropout rate, we anticipate 80% power to detect a 50% reduction in postpartum depressive episodes while controlling the type 1 error at 5%.

ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION

The study protocol is approved by the Regional Committees on Health Research Ethics in the Capital Region of Denmark, the Danish Medicines Agency and the Centre for Data Protection Compliance in the Capital Region of Denmark. We will present results at scientific meetings and in peer-reviewed journals and in other formats to engage policymakers and the public.

TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER

NCT04685148.

The Power of Smiling: The Adult Brain Networks Underlying Learned Infant Emotionality

The perception of infant emotionality, one aspect of temperament, starts to form in infancy, yet the underlying mechanisms of how infant emotionality affects adult neural dynamics remain unclear. We used a social reward task with probabilistic visual and auditory feedback (infant laughter or crying) to train 47 nulliparous women to perceive the emotional style of six different infants. Using functional neuroimaging, we subsequently measured brain activity while participants were tested on the learned emotionality of the six infants. We characterized the elicited patterns of dynamic functional brain connectivity using Leading Eigenvector Dynamics Analysis and found significant activity in a brain network linking the orbitofrontal cortex with the amygdala and hippocampus, where the probability of occurrence significantly correlated with the valence of the learned infant emotional disposition. In other words, seeing infants with neutral face expressions after having interacted and learned their various degrees of positive and negative emotional dispositions proportionally increased the activity in a brain network previously shown to be involved in pleasure, emotion, and memory. These findings provide novel neuroimaging insights into how the perception of happy versus sad infant emotionality shapes adult brain networks.

Anxiety biases audiovisual processing of social signals

In everyday life, information from multiple senses is integrated for a holistic understanding of emotion. Despite evidence of atypical multisensory perception in populations with socio-emotional difficulties (e.g., autistic individuals), little research to date has examined how anxiety impacts on multisensory emotion perception. Here we examined whether the level of trait anxiety in a sample of 56 healthy adults affected audiovisual processing of emotion for three types of stimuli: dynamic faces and voices, body motion and dialogues of two interacting agents, and circles and tones. Participants judged emotion from four types of displays - audio-only, visual-only, audiovisual congruent (e.g., angry face and angry voice) and audiovisual incongruent (e.g., angry face and happy voice) - as happy or angry, as quickly as possible. In one task, participants based their emotional judgements on information in one modality while ignoring information in the other, and in a second task they based their judgements on their overall impressions of the stimuli. The results showed that the higher trait anxiety group prioritized the processing of angry cues when combining faces and voices that portrayed conflicting emotions. Individuals in this group were also more likely to benefit from combining congruent face and voice cues when recognizing anger. The multisensory effects of anxiety were found to be independent of the effects of autistic traits. The observed effects of trait anxiety on multisensory processing of emotion may serve to maintain anxiety by increasing sensitivity to social-threat and thus contributing to interpersonal difficulties.

Processing of infant emotion in mothers with mood disorders and implications for infant development

BACKGROUND

Atypical neurocognitive responses to emotional stimuli are core features of unipolar depression (UD) and bipolar disorder (BD). For mothers with these mood disorders, this may influence interactions with their infants and consequently infant development. The study aimed to investigate psychophysiological and cognitive responses to infant emotional stimuli, and their relation to mother-infant interaction and infant development, in mothers with BD or UD in full or partial remission.

METHODS

Four months after birth, mothers' cognitive responses to emotional infant stimuli were assessed with computerized tasks, while their facial expressions, galvanic skin responses (GSR), gazes, and fixations were recorded. Infant development and mother-infant interactions were also assessed.

RESULTS

We included 76 mothers: 27 with BD, 13 with UD, and 36 without known psychiatric disorders, and their infants. Mothers with BD and UD were in full or partial remission and showed blunted GSR and spent less time looking at infant stimuli (unadjusted p values < 0.03). Mothers with BD showed subtle positive neurocognitive biases (unadjusted p values<0.04) and mothers with UD showed negative biases (unadjusted p values < 0.02). Across all mothers, some measures of atypical infant emotion processing correlated with some measures of delays in infant development and suboptimal mother-infant interaction (unadjusted p values<0.04).

CONCLUSIONS

Mothers with mood disorders in full or partial remission showed atypical cognitive and psychophysiological response to emotional infant stimuli, which could be associated with mother-infant interactions and infant development. The study is explorative, hypothesis generating, and should be replicated in a larger sample. Investigation of the long-term implications of reduced maternal sensitivity is warranted.

The emotional canvas of human screams: patterns and acoustic cues in the perceptual categorization of a basic call type

Screams occur across taxonomically widespread species, typically in antipredator situations, and are strikingly similar acoustically, but in nonhuman primates, they have taken on acoustically varied forms in association with more contextually complex functions related to agonistic recruitment. Humans scream in an even broader range of contexts, but the extent to which acoustic variation allows listeners to perceive different emotional meanings remains unknown. We investigated how listeners responded to 30 contextually diverse human screams on six different emotion prompts as well as how selected acoustic cues predicted these responses. We found that acoustic variation in screams was associated with the perception of different emotions from these calls. Emotion ratings generally fell along two dimensions: one contrasting perceived anger, frustration, and pain with surprise and happiness, roughly associated with call duration and roughness, and one related to perceived fear, associated with call fundamental frequency. Listeners were more likely to rate screams highly in emotion prompts matching the source context, suggesting that some screams conveyed information about emotional context, but it is noteworthy that the analysis of screams from happiness contexts (n = 11 screams) revealed that they more often yielded higher ratings of fear. We discuss the implications of these findings for the role and evolution of nonlinguistic vocalizations in human communication, including consideration of how the expanded diversity in calls such as human screams might represent a derived function of language.

Social anxiety symptoms, heart rate variability, and vocal emotion recognition in women: evidence for parasympathetically-mediated positivity bias

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Individuals with social anxiety disorder show pronounced perceptual biases in social contexts, such as being hypervigilant to threat and discounting positive social cues. Parasympathetic activity influences responses to the social environment and may underlie these biases. This study examined the associations among social anxiety symptoms, heart rate variability (HRV), and vocal emotion recognition.

DESIGN AND METHOD

Female undergraduate students (N = 124) self-reported their social anxiety symptoms using the Social Anxiety Disorder Dimensional Scale and completed a computerized vocal emotion recognition task using stimuli from the Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song stimulus set. HRV was measured at baseline and during the emotion recognition task.

RESULTS

Women with more social anxiety symptoms had higher emotion recognition accuracy (p = .021) and rated positive stimuli as less intense (p = .032). Additionally, although those with greater social anxiety symptoms did not have lower resting HRV (p = .459), they did have lower task HRV (p = .026), which mediated their lower positivity bias and greater recognition accuracy.

CONCLUSIONS

A parasympathetically-mediated positivity bias may indicate or facilitate normal social functioning in women. Additionally, HRV during a symptom- or disorder-relevant task may predict task performance and reveal parasympathetic differences that are not found at baseline.

An integrative analysis of 5HTT-mediated mechanism of hyperactivity to non-threatening voices

The tonic model delineating the serotonin transporter polymorphism’s (5-HTTLPR) modulatory effect on anxiety points towards a universal underlying mechanism involving a hyper-or-elevated baseline level of arousal even to non-threatening stimuli. However, to our knowledge, this mechanism has never been observed in non-clinical cohorts exhibiting high anxiety. Moreover, empirical support regarding said association is mixed, potentially because of publication bias with a relatively small sample size. Hence, how the 5-HTTLPR modulates neural correlates remains controversial. Here we show that 5-HTTLPR short-allele carriers had significantly increased baseline ERPs and reduced fearful MMN, phenomena which can nevertheless be reversed by acute anxiolytic treatment. This provides evidence that the 5-HTT affects the automatic processing of threatening and non-threatening voices, impacts broadly on social cognition, and conclusively asserts the heightened baseline arousal level as the universal underlying neural mechanism for anxiety-related susceptibilities, functioning as a spectrum-like distribution from high trait anxiety non-patients to anxiety patients.

Chen et al. apply a multi-level approach to show that serotonin signaling modulates neuronal responses to both threatening and non-threatening voices even in the pre-attentive stage. They show that 5-HTTLPR short-allele carriers had higher baseline event-related potentials and lower fearful mismatch negativity, which can be reversed by acute anxiolytic treatment.

Positive social feedback alters emotional ratings and reward valuation of neutral faces

Evaluation of facial and vocal emotional cues is vital in social interactions but can be highly influenced by characteristics of the observer, such as sex, age, and symptoms of affective disorders. Our evaluations of others' emotional expressions are likely to change as we get to know them and anticipate how they are likely to behave. However, the role of associative learning in the evaluation of social cues remains poorly understood. In this study, we investigated whether emotional ratings (valence and arousal) and reward valuation ("liking" and "wanting" measures) of neutral facial expressions can be altered through associative learning. We also examined whether emotional ratings and reward valuation varied with symptoms of anxiety and depression, disorders known to impair socio-affective functioning. Participants (N = 324) were young adults, ranging in scores across dimensions of depression and anxiety symptoms: "general distress" (common to depression and anxiety), "anhedonia-apprehension" (more specific to depression), and "fears" (more specific to anxiety). They rated neutral faces and completed a probabilistic learning task that paired images of neutral faces with positive or negative social feedback. Results demonstrated that pairing neutral faces with positive social feedback increased ratings of arousal, valence, and reward valuation (both "liking" and "wanting"). Pairing neutral faces with negative feedback reduced valence ratings and reduced "wanting," but did not impact arousal ratings or "liking." Symptoms of general distress were associated with negative bias in valence ratings, symptoms of anhedonia-apprehension were associated with reduced "wanting," and symptoms of fears were associated with altered accuracy over trials. Notably, the association between general distress and negative bias was reduced following the associative learning task. This suggests that disrupted evaluation of social cues can be improved through brief training.

Pawsitively sad: pet-owners are more sensitive to negative emotion in animal distress vocalizations

Pets have numerous, effective methods to communicate with their human hosts. Perhaps most conspicuous of these are distress vocalizations: in cats, the 'miaow' and in dogs, the 'whine' or 'whimper'. We compared a sample of young adults who owned cats and or dogs ('pet-owners' n = 264) and who did not (n = 297) on their ratings of the valence of animal distress vocalizations, taken from a standardized database of sounds. We also examined these participants' self-reported symptoms of anxiety and depression, and their scores on a measure of interpersonal relationship functioning. Pet-owners rated the animal distress vocalizations as sadder than adults who did not own a pet. Cat-owners specifically gave the most negative ratings of cat miaows compared with other participants, but were no different in their ratings of other sounds. Dog sounds were rated more negatively overall, in fact as negatively as human baby cries. Pet-owning adults (cat only, dog only, both) were not significantly different from adults with no pets on symptoms of depression, anxiety or on self-reported interpersonal relationship functioning. We suggest that pet ownership is associated with greater sensitivity to negative emotion in cat and dog distress vocalizations.

Test-Retest Reliability of Mismatch Negativity (MMN) to Emotional Voices

A voice from kin species conveys indispensable social and affective signals with uniquely phylogenetic and ontogenetic standpoints. However, the neural underpinning of emotional voices, beyond low-level acoustic features, activates a processing chain that proceeds from the auditory pathway to the brain structures implicated in cognition and emotion. By using a passive auditory oddball paradigm, which employs emotional voices, this study investigates the test–retest reliability of emotional mismatch negativity (MMN), indicating that the deviants of positively (happily)- and negatively (angrily)-spoken syllables, as compared to neutral standards, can trigger MMN as a response to an automatic discrimination of emotional salience. The neurophysiological estimates of MMN to positive and negative deviants appear to be highly reproducible, irrespective of the subject’s attentional disposition: whether the subjects are set to a condition that involves watching a silent movie or do a working memory task. Specifically, negativity bias is evinced as threatening, relative to positive vocalizations, consistently inducing larger MMN amplitudes, regardless of the day and the time of a day. The present findings provide evidence to support the fact that emotional MMN offers a stable platform to detect subtle changes in current emotional shifts.

Gender Differences in the Recognition of Vocal Emotions

The conflicting findings from the few studies conducted with regard to gender differences in the recognition of vocal expressions of emotion have left the exact nature of these differences unclear. Several investigators have argued that a comprehensive understanding of gender differences in vocal emotion recognition can only be achieved by replicating these studies while accounting for influential factors such as stimulus type, gender-balanced samples, number of encoders, decoders, and emotional categories. This study aimed to account for these factors by investigating whether emotion recognition from vocal expressions differs as a function of both listeners' and speakers' gender. A total of N = 290 participants were randomly and equally allocated to two groups. One group listened to words and pseudo-words, while the other group listened to sentences and affect bursts. Participants were asked to categorize the stimuli with respect to the expressed emotions in a fixed-choice response format. Overall, females were more accurate than males when decoding vocal emotions, however, when testing for specific emotions these differences were small in magnitude. Speakers' gender had a significant impact on how listeners' judged emotions from the voice. The group listening to words and pseudo-words had higher identification rates for emotions spoken by male than by female actors, whereas in the group listening to sentences and affect bursts the identification rates were higher when emotions were uttered by female than male actors. The mixed pattern for emotion-specific effects, however, indicates that, in the vocal channel, the reliability of emotion judgments is not systematically influenced by speakers' gender and the related stereotypes of emotional expressivity. Together, these results extend previous findings by showing effects of listeners' and speakers' gender on the recognition of vocal emotions. They stress the importance of distinguishing these factors to explain recognition ability in the processing of emotional prosody.

Duration of motherhood has incremental effects on mothers' neural processing of infant vocal cues: a neuroimaging study of women

The transition to motherhood, and the resultant experience of caregiving, may change the way women respond to affective, infant signals in their environments. Nonhuman animal studies have robustly demonstrated that mothers process both infant and other salient signals differently from nonmothers. Here, we investigated how women with and without young infants respond to vocalisations from infants and adults (both crying and neutral). We examined mothers with infants ranging in age (1-14 months) to examine the effects of duration of maternal experience. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that mothers showed greater activity than nonmothers to vocalisations from adults or infants in a range of cortical regions implicated in the processing of affective auditory cues. This main effect of maternal status suggests a general difference in vocalisation processing across infant and adult sounds. We found that a longer duration of motherhood, and therefore more experience with an infant, was associated with greater infant-specific activity in key parental brain regions, including the orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala. We suggest that these incremental differences in neural activity in the maternal brain reflect the building of parental capacity over time. This is consistent with conceptualizations of caregiving as a dynamic, learning process in humans.