The voices of wrath: brain responses to angry prosody in meaningless speech (original) (raw)

Nature Neuroscience volume 8, pages 145–146 (2005) Cite this article

Abstract

We report two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments showing enhanced responses in human middle superior temporal sulcus for angry relative to neutral prosody. This emotional enhancement was voice specific, unrelated to isolated acoustic amplitude or frequency cues in angry prosody, and distinct from any concomitant task-related attentional modulation. Attention and emotion seem to have separate effects on stimulus processing, reflecting a fundamental principle of human brain organization shared by voice and face perception.

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Figure 1: Cortical activations elicited by spatial attention and emotional prosody.

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Acknowledgements

We thank T. Bänziger for helpful discussions. Supported by grants from the Swiss National Foundations (K.S., P.V. and S.S.).

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Author notes

  1. Didier Grandjean and David Sander: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Geneva Emotion Research Group, University of Geneva, bd. du Pont d'Arve 40, Geneva, CH-1205, Switzerland
    Didier Grandjean, David Sander & Klaus R Scherer
  2. Departments of Neurology and Neurosciences, Laboratory for Neurology and Imaging of Cognition, Centre Médical Universitaire, University of Geneva, rue Michel-Servet 1, Geneva, 4, CH-1211, Switzerland
    Gilles Pourtois, Sophie Schwartz, Mohamed L Seghier & Patrik Vuilleumier
  3. Department of Radiology, Geneva University Hospital, Rue Micheli-du-Crest 24, Geneva, 14, CH-1211, Switzerland
    Mohamed L Seghier
  4. Department of Psychology, University of Geneva, bd. du Pont d'Arve 40, Geneva, CH-1205, Switzerland
    Patrik Vuilleumier

Authors

  1. Didier Grandjean
  2. David Sander
  3. Gilles Pourtois
  4. Sophie Schwartz
  5. Mohamed L Seghier
  6. Klaus R Scherer
  7. Patrik Vuilleumier

Corresponding author

Correspondence toDidier Grandjean.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Grandjean, D., Sander, D., Pourtois, G. et al. The voices of wrath: brain responses to angry prosody in meaningless speech.Nat Neurosci 8, 145–146 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1392

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