Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, JARA-Translational Brain Medicine, RWTH Aachen University, Germany.
Neuroimage. 2010 Mar;50(1):250-9. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.11.082. Epub 2009 Dec 5.
In verbal communication, prosodic codes may be phylogenetically older than lexical ones. Little is known, however, about early, automatic encoding of emotional prosody. This study investigated the neuromagnetic analogue of mismatch negativity (MMN) as an index of early stimulus processing of emotional prosody using whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG). We applied two different paradigms to study MMN; in addition to the traditional oddball paradigm, the so-called optimum design was adapted to emotion detection. In a sequence of randomly changing disyllabic pseudo-words produced by one male speaker in neutral intonation, a traditional oddball design with emotional deviants (10% happy and angry each) and an optimum design with emotional (17% happy and sad each) and nonemotional gender deviants (17% female) elicited the mismatch responses. The emotional category changes demonstrated early responses (<200 ms) at both auditory cortices with larger amplitudes at the right hemisphere. Responses to the nonemotional change from male to female voices emerged later ( approximately 300 ms). Source analysis pointed at bilateral auditory cortex sources without robust contribution from other such as frontal sources. Conceivably, both auditory cortices encode categorical representations of emotional prosodic. Processing of cognitive feature extraction and automatic emotion appraisal may overlap at this level enabling rapid attentional shifts to important social cues.
在口头交流中，韵律代码可能比词汇代码在进化上更为古老。然而，对于情感韵律的早期自动编码知之甚少。本研究使用全头磁脑图（MEG）研究了情绪韵律的早期刺激处理的错误相关负波（MMN）的神经磁类似物，作为其指标。我们应用了两种不同的范式来研究 MMN；除了传统的偏离范式外，还采用了所谓的最佳设计来进行情绪检测。在一个由一个男性以中性语调随机改变的双音节假词序列中，使用具有情绪偏离（10％的快乐和愤怒）的传统偏离设计和具有情绪（17％的快乐和悲伤）和非情绪性别偏离（17％的女性）的最佳设计诱发了不匹配反应。情绪类别变化在两个听觉皮层中均显示出早期反应（<200ms），右侧半球的振幅较大。从男性到女性声音的非情绪变化的反应出现较晚（约 300ms）。源分析指向双侧听觉皮层源，而不是额叶等其他源的可靠贡献。可以想象，两个听觉皮层都对情感韵律的分类表示进行编码。认知特征提取和自动情绪评估的处理可能在此级别上重叠，从而可以快速将注意力转移到重要的社交线索上。
