Valence specific laterality effects in prosody: Expectancy account and the effects of morphed prosody and stimulus lead.
Publication date
2007Keyword
Top-downEndogenous
Vocal affect
Extreme male brain hypothesis
F0
Synthetic
Resynthesis
Acoustic
Affective prosody
Emotion perception
Peer-Reviewed
Yes
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The majority of studies have demonstrated a right hemisphere (RH) advantage for the perception of emotions. Other studies have found that the involvement of each hemisphere is valence specific, with the RH better at perceiving negative emotions and the LH better at perceiving positive emotions [Reuter-Lorenz, P., & Davidson, R.J. (1981) Differential contributions of the 2 cerebral hemispheres to the perception of happy and sad faces.Neuropsychologia, 19, 609¿613]. To account for valence laterality effects in emotion perception we propose an `expectancy¿ hypothesis which suggests that valence effects are obtained when the top-down expectancy to perceive an emotion outweighs the strength of bottom-up perceptual information enabling the discrimination of an emotion. A dichotic listening task was used to examine alternative explanations of valence effects in emotion perception. Emotional sentences (spoken in a happy or sad tone of voice), and morphed-happy and morphed-sad sentences (which blended a neutral version of the sentence with the pitch of the emotion sentence) were paired with neutral versions of each sentence and presented dichotically. A control condition was also used, consisting of two identical neutral sentences presented dichotically, with one channel arriving before the other by 7 ms. In support of the RH hypothesis there was a left ear advantage for the perception of sad and happy emotional sentences. However, morphed sentences showed no ear advantage, suggesting that the RH is specialised for the perception of genuine emotions and that a laterality effect may be a useful tool for the detection of fake emotion. Finally, for the control condition we obtained an interaction between the expected emotion and the effect of ear lead. Participants tended to select the ear that received the sentence first, when they expected a `sad¿ sentence, but not when they expected a `happy¿ sentence. The results are discussed in relation to the different theoretical explanations of valence laterality effects in emotion perception.Version
published version paperCitation
Rodway, P. and Schepman, A. (2007). Valence specific laterality effects in prosody: Expectancy account and the effects of morphed prosody and stimulus lead. Brain and Cognition, Vol. 63, No. 1, pp. 31-41.Link to Version of Record
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2006.07.008Type
Articleae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2006.07.008