Chapter 11 - Emotional Voices

Summary

This chapter explains how human beings infer emotional meaning from vocal signals. It reviews research on cerebral processes that contribute to the decoding of emotions from vocal cues such as speech prosody or nonverbal vocalizations like laughter. With the advent of modern brain imaging techniques, research has achieved substantial progress in delineating the neurobiological bases of (emotional) voice perception. In particular, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has contributed greatly to the understanding of how the brain processes emotional information in human voices. Despite the methodological limitations, however, empirical evidence and hypotheses reviewed in the chapter suggest the idea of two distinct modes of speech prosody processing, each implemented differently in the human brain: explicit processing and implicit processing. Suppression of limbic activation reflects a recruitment of emotion regulation processes that attenuate the automatic induction of emotional reactions associated with limbic activation in order to avoid emotional interference in goal-directed behavior.