Schepman Astrid, Rodway Paul, Cornmell Louise, Smith Bethany, de Sa Sabrina Lauren, Borwick Ciara, Belfon-Thompson Elisha
a Department of Psychology , University of Chester , Chester , UK.
Laterality. 2018 May;23(3):290-317. doi: 10.1080/1357650X.2017.1360902. Epub 2017 Aug 2.
Much evidence suggests that the processing of emotions is lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain. However, under some circumstances the left hemisphere might play a role, particularly for positive emotions and emotional experiences. We explored whether emotion contagion was right-lateralized, lateralized valence-specifically, or potentially left-lateralized. In two experiments, right-handed female listeners rated to what extent emotionally intoned pseudo-sentences evoked target emotions in them. These sound stimuli had a 7 ms ear lead in the left or right channel, leading to stronger stimulation of the contralateral hemisphere. In both experiments, the results revealed that right ear lead stimuli received subtly but significantly higher evocation scores, suggesting a left hemisphere dominance for emotion contagion. A control experiment using an emotion identification task showed no effect of ear lead. The findings are discussed in relation to prior findings that have linked the processing of emotional prosody to left-hemisphere brain regions that regulate emotions, control orofacial musculature, are involved in affective empathy processing areas, or have an affinity for processing emotions socially. Future work is needed to eliminate alternative interpretations and understand the mechanisms involved. Our novel binaural asynchrony method may be useful in future work in auditory laterality.
许多证据表明，情绪加工在大脑右半球呈偏侧化。然而，在某些情况下，左半球可能也发挥作用，特别是对于积极情绪和情感体验。我们探究了情绪感染是右半球偏侧化、基于效价的偏侧化，还是可能左半球偏侧化。在两项实验中，右利手女性听众对带有情感语调的伪句子在多大程度上引发她们的目标情绪进行评分。这些声音刺激在左声道或右声道有7毫秒的耳间领先，从而对侧半球受到更强刺激。在两项实验中，结果均显示右耳领先刺激获得的诱发分数略高但显著更高，这表明在情绪感染方面左半球占主导。一项使用情绪识别任务的对照实验显示耳间领先没有影响。结合先前的研究结果对这些发现进行了讨论，先前的研究结果将情绪韵律的加工与调节情绪、控制口面部肌肉组织、参与情感共情加工区域或在社交中处理情绪方面有相关性的左半球脑区联系起来。需要进一步的研究来消除其他解释并理解其中涉及的机制。我们新颖的双耳异步方法可能在未来听觉偏侧化研究中有用。
