Neuro-cognitive studies of vocal emotion processing in speech

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The field of "social neuroscience" is developing rapidly, and there is a recent surge of interest in how humans communicate their emotions and respond to emotional stimuli. In this research program, we investigate a topic that has been somewhat neglected-how emotions are expressed and understood from the human voice while speaking, and how underlying mental functions are structured in the brain. To recognize vocal expressions of emotion (e.g., anger, joy), listeners must process acoustic fluctuations in speech, such as pitch, loudness, and rhythm, which differentiate over time in emotionally meaningful ways. The fact that emotional expressions in the voice are represented across time raises a critical empirical question: how quickly do we detect emotions when listening to a speaker's voice? And what neural structures are involved? Understanding the precise time course for recognizing emotional meanings in speech will be fundamental for describing the human capacity for acoustic communication and the basis of this system in the brain. Another important question that we will address is: when listeners recognize vocal expressions of emotion, does this information guide their visual attention and/or judgements of visual stimuli (e.g., facial expressions) in systematic ways? Answering this question will tell us much about natural social interactions, where humans must typically integrate emotional cues in more than one sensory modality in socially meaningful and adaptive ways. Our studies will involve young, healthy adults and our questions will be tested from different vantage points, using complementary methods at the forefront of cognitive neuroscience (behavioural approaches, eye-tracking, electrophysiology, and neuroimaging). Our research will lead to a more sophisticated model of the neuro-cognitive mechanisms that support emotional communication through the voice, and in broader terms, it will shed light on the uniquely human capacity to communicate both linguistic and emotional meanings using complex auditory signals. Our results will energize debate and spark new ideas that will significantly advance knowledge of how humans interact socially and communicate their emotions and intentions.