The Brain Mechanisms Of Emotional Prosodies Processing

Being able to accurately identify the emotional prosody in other people’s language is beneficial for the receiver to understand and express the content,which is very important for social communication.There have been some researches on the brain mechanism of emotional prosody processing.However,most of the previous studies explored the cognitive neural mechanism of emotional prosody processing from the point of view of comparing the activation differences between non-neutral emotional prosody and neutral emotional prosody,while the comparison between various non-neutral emotional prosody(such as positive prosody contrast negative prosody)is less investigated.In addition,previous studies have basically used functional magnetic resonance imaging technology.In this study,silent functional near-infrared spectroscopy,was used to investigate the specific activation brain regions of anger,fear and happiness by passive listening and active listening according to the task,which provided more scientific basis for elucidating the brain mechanism of emotional prosody processing in different tasks.In the first study,we asked the subjects to listen passively,using anger,fear,happiness and neutral prosodic speech fragments as stimulating materials.The results show that the superior temporal cortex,especially the right superior temporal gyrus,is mainly used to distinguish between emotional prosody and neutral prosody.In addition,the results show that the classification of emotions occurs in the frontal cortex,and the brain activation patterns of the three emotional prosodies are separate.In the second study,implicit tasks and explicit tasks were set to explore the changes of blood oxygen in the cerebral cortex of emotional prosody processing under different task conditions.The results showed that the specific brain regions for processing anger prosody,fear prosody and happiness prosody were left orbitofrontal cortex,right superior marginal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus,respectively.The results of two studies show that the superior temporal gyrus—decoding speech prosodies irrespective of emotional valence;secondly,the frontal cortex is the main brain area responsible for distinguishing different emotional prosody;finally,the processing of positive emotion is not affected by task types,and people show positivity bias when processing emotional prosody,while negative emotional prosody is the opposite.These findings confirm and extend the previous results of f MRI in this field.On the whole,this study explored the brain mechanism of emotional prosody processing from different tasks,and also made some theoretical contributions.