Electrophysiological insights into processing nonverbal emotional vocalizations

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.
This work was supported by a joint PhD student
scholarship (2009658022) from China Scholarship Council
awarded to T.S.L., a postdoctoral grant (SFRH/BPD/
68967/2010) from Fundac¸a˜o para a Cieˆncia e a Tecnologia
(FCT) (Portugal) awarded to A.P.P., and by the National
Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) (RO1 MH 040799
grant awarded to R.W.M.; RO3 MH 078036 grant awarded
to M.A.N.).