Schirmer Annett, Escoffier Nicolas, Zysset Stefan, Koester Dirk, Striano Tricia, Friederici Angela D
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Neuroimage. 2008 Apr 15;40(3):1402-10. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.01.018. Epub 2008 Jan 26.
Previous work on vocal emotional processing provided little evidence for involvement of emotional processing areas such as the amygdala or the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Here, we sought to specify whether involvement of these areas depends on how relevant vocal expressions are for the individual. To this end, we assessed participants' social orientation--a measure of the interest and concern for other individuals and hence the relevance of social signals. We then presented task-irrelevant syllable sequences that contained rare changes in tone of voice that could be emotional or neutral. Processing differences between emotional and neutral vocal change in the right amygdala and the bilateral OFC were significantly correlated with the social orientation measure. Specifically, higher social orientation scores were associated with enhanced amygdala and OFC activity to emotional as compared to neutral change. Given the presumed role of the amygdala in the detection of emotionally relevant information, our results suggest that social orientation enhances this detection process and the activation of emotional representations mediated by the OFC. Moreover, social orientation may predict listener responses to vocal emotional cues and explain interindividual variability in vocal emotional processing.
先前关于声音情绪加工的研究几乎没有证据表明杏仁核或眶额皮质（OFC）等情绪加工区域参与其中。在此，我们试图明确这些区域的参与是否取决于声音表达对个体的相关程度。为此，我们评估了参与者的社会取向——一种对他人的兴趣和关注程度的衡量指标，从而反映社会信号的相关性。然后，我们呈现了与任务无关的音节序列，其中包含罕见的语调变化，这些变化可能是情绪化的或中性的。右侧杏仁核和双侧眶额皮质中情绪性和中性声音变化的加工差异与社会取向指标显著相关。具体而言，与中性变化相比，更高的社会取向得分与杏仁核和眶额皮质对情绪变化的增强活动相关。鉴于杏仁核在检测情绪相关信息中的假定作用，我们的结果表明社会取向增强了这一检测过程以及由眶额皮质介导的情绪表征的激活。此外，社会取向可能预测听众对声音情绪线索的反应，并解释声音情绪加工中的个体差异。
