Electrophysiological insights into processing nonverbal emotional vocalizations

Abstract

The ability to identify emotions from the human voice is a crucial aspect of social cognition. Currently, very little is known about the neural correlates of nonverbal emotional vocalizations processing. We used electrophysiological measures to examine the processing of emotional versus neutral vocalizations. Participants listened to nonverbal angry, happy, and neutral vocalizations, as well as to monkey voices, which served as a response target. Angry sounds were processed differently than happy and neutral ones starting at 50 ms, whereas both vocal emotions were associated with decreased N100 and increased P200 components relative to neutral sounds. These findings indicate a rapid and automatic differentiation of emotional as compared with neutral vocalizations and suggest that this differentiation is not dependent on valence.