The Processing Of Emotional Prosody Process Under The Two Attentional Conditions

A key function of emotion is to prepare for the reaction. However, to develop effective behavioral strategies needed for effective encoding of emotional stimuli. For the processing of emotional stimuli, the researcher's experimental materials commonly used facial expression, emotional pictures, and for emotional speech recognition mechanism is relatively small, and most of studies are the Indo-European. Chinese is a tonal language, which is very different from non-tone language. In addition, recent studies showed that attentional resources can change the recognition speed of emotional prosody information, but the identification of emotional prosody has valence effects and gender differences is still controversial. Therefore, this study further explore the characteristics of Chinese emotional prosody recognition based on previous research.In this paper, the voice words of happy, neutral and anger(meaning neutral) is the experimental materials, we used event-related brain potential (ERP) measures to study the psychological process of emotional prosody identification and investigate the effect of gender on emotional prosody recognition of Chinese under two attention condition. Behavioral results showed:In two experiments, identification of emotional stimulus are faster than neutral stimulus, and there is negative bias, that anger stimulus are faster than the emotional stimuli of happy, indicate that this effect didn't regulate by attention resources. ERP results showed that:(1)in the two attentional conditions, in the early stages of sensory processing, the responses evoked by neutral stimuli and emotional stimuli were different significantly, and there is negative bias, that is, negative stimuli can be better processed, indicate that negative bias of emotional stimuli exists in the early stages; (2) In 175-275ms (P2) the time window, attentional conditions can regulate emotions prosody processing, In the first experiment that the experimental emotional decision task, there is negative bias, and anger emotion can evoke more positive P2 component, and in the second experiment that sex determination task, it does not exist valence effect, indicating that in the non-attention conditions, there is no integration of acoustic cues were tested to extract the emotional significance of prosodic features; (3) In the late stages of evaluation processing and response preparation, in the two attention conditions, anger stimuli evoked more positive wave than neutral and happy emotion stimulus, indicating that the negative emotional stimulus had stronger stimulate correlation, thus negative stimuli get more in-depth processing. In addition, the negative stimuli commonly associated with the risk, and thus it can attract the attentional resources of the individual more easily, and carry out further processing, so it induced more positive LPC component. Pleased emotional stimuli and neutral speech stimuli was not different significant, it is possible that discrimination between them is not great (4) Finally, there wasn't gender differences on the identification of emotional prosody. In summary, under the two attention conditions, the recognized process of emotional prosodic features has different cognitive mechanisms, compare with the neutral stimuli, the individual can recognize emotional prosody effectively.