Aging Effect On Processing Automaticity Of Emotional Semantic And Emotional Prosody

The researchers agreed that the evolution of emotion promoted its processing with high automaticity. It is important to study the processing and integrated approach of emotion information in the speech understanding. Emotional prosody, a speech expression of non-vocabulary, possess crucial voice clue, such as frequency, amplitude and duration of syllable, which convey different emotion information. Emotional semantic conveys lexical information, such as "joyful", "sadness". Some researches in the sentence level had examined the interaction and its temporal course of the process of emotional prosody and emotional semantic, and supported the interaction emotional prosody and emotional semantic, and held that emotional semantic cannot be ignored relative to emotional prosody, when the emotion information transferred by oral. The researches in the lexical level also supported the interaction emotional prosody and emotional semantic. However, we did not ensure which is processed first, and more automatically, emotional prosody and emotional semantic? The first reason was the difference of the lexical selected, which were either intuitive, easy and concrete, like "happy/sadness"; or abstract, like "safe/disaster", leading to different degree of difficulty to judge prosody and semantic. The second reason was the different methods (behavior or ERPs) used in those studies, and which were not easy to compare. So, the current study examined processing automaticity on prosody and semantic for concrete and abstract emotional lexis using the simple behavioral methodl.With the increasing serious aging problems, the mental characters of the old attracts more attentions. Studies had founded that the identify and memory ability to negative emotion (eg, human faces or pictures) were gradually decreased for the old, but the positive emotion didn't showe obvious the aging effect. And if this emotional processing character can impact the process of emotional prosody and emotional semantic for the elderly? Does it exsit the aged effect on emotional prosody and emotional semantic? These will be another important aspect in current study. According to problems of these emotional research, the current experiment used Stroop paradigm to investigate the following questions:(1) Processing automaticity of oral emotional prosody and emotional semantic in young and old; (2) Exploring the aging effect on emotional prosody and emotional semantic; (3) Investigating the universality of processing automaticity of oral emotional prosody and emotional semantic of the young and old in varying difficulty of tasks. It was hypothesized that:(1) the emotional semantic processing is more automated than the emotional prosody processing for specific emotional words in both young and old; (2) the emotional prosody processing is more automated than the emotional semantic processing for abstract emotional words in both young and old; (3) it exists aging effect on emotional prosody and emotional semantic for the old. Taken college students and the elderly as participants, two experiments were designed to verify these hypotheses.Experiment 1 took the specific emotional words as stimuli and used emotional prosody discrimination and emotional semantic discrimination as the experimental tasks in Stroop paradigm. The response time and the error rate were recorded. The statistics analysis showed that:(1) the interaction strength of semantic and prosodic in reaction time and error rates of prosody task were significantly higher than those of semantic task for the old; (2) the interaction strength of semantic and prosody in reaction time of prosody task were not significantly higher than that of semantic task for the college students; while the interaction strength of semantic and prosodic in error rates of prosody task were significantly higher than that of semantic task for the college students; (3)in congruent semantic condition of semantic task, the difference of reaction time between positive semantic/happy tone and positive semantic/angry tone for the old was less than one of the college students; the differences of reaction time between negative semantic/happy tone and negative semantic/angry tone were not significantly different between the old and the college students; (4) in congruent prosody condition of prosody task, the differences of reaction time between positive semantic/angry tone and negative semantic/angry tone were not significantly different between the old and the college students; the difference of reaction tim between positive semantic/angry tone and negative semantic/angry tone for the old was less than one of the college students.Experiment 2 took the abstract emotional words as stimuli and used emotional prosody discrimination and emotional semantic discrimination as the experimental tasks in Stroop paradigm. The response time and the error rate were recorded. The statistics analysis showed that:(1) the interaction strength of semantic and prosodic in reaction time and error rates of prosody task were significantly higher than those of semantic task for the old; (2) the interaction strength of semantic and prosody in reaction time and error rates of semantic task were significantly higher than those of prosody task for the college students; (3)in congruent semantic condition of semantic task, the difference of reaction time between positive semantic/happy tone and positive semantic/angry tone for the old was less than one of the college students; the differences of reaction time between negative semantic/happy tone and negative semantic/angry tone were not significantly different between the old and the college students; (4) in congruent prosody condition of prosody task, the differences of reaction time between positive semantic/angry tone and negative semantic/angry tone were not significantly different between the old and the college students; the difference of reaction time between positive semantic/angry tone and negative semantic/angry tone for the old was less than one of the college students.Conclusively, the research on aging effect of processing automaticity of emotional prosody and emotional semantic in Stroop paradigm had the following conclusions:(1)it was influenced by the difficulty of stimuli on processing automaticity of emotional prosody and emotional semantic for the young, while for the elderly, it wasn't influenced by the difficulty of stimuli on processing automaticity of emotional prosody and emotional semantic. (2) it existed aging effect on emotional prosody information for the elderly, while it did not reflect the aging effect on emotional semantic information processing for the elderly. This study makes us profoundly understand the processing methods of emotional prosody and emotional semantic and reveals aging characteristics of emotional processing. These findings enrich the theory of emotional processing and help to fully understand the aging process of individuals and the psychological needs of the elderly, so as to provide important support for effectively promoting the healthy and the life quality for the elderly.