Department for General Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena 07743, Germany.
Voice Research Unit, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena 07743, Germany.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2022 Dec 1;17(12):1145-1154. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsac033.
Our ability to infer a speaker's emotional state depends on the processing of acoustic parameters such as fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre. Yet, how these parameters are processed and integrated to inform emotion perception remains largely unknown. Here we pursued this issue using a novel parameter-specific voice morphing technique to create stimuli with emotion modulations in only F0 or only timbre. We used these stimuli together with fully modulated vocal stimuli in an event-related potential (ERP) study in which participants listened to and identified stimulus emotion. ERPs (P200 and N400) and behavioral data converged in showing that both F0 and timbre support emotion processing but do so differently for different emotions: Whereas F0 was most relevant for responses to happy, fearful and sad voices, timbre was most relevant for responses to voices expressing pleasure. Together, these findings offer original insights into the relative significance of different acoustic parameters for early neuronal representations of speaker emotion and show that such representations are predictive of subsequent evaluative judgments.
我们推断说话者情绪状态的能力取决于对基频（F0）和音色等声学参数的处理。然而，这些参数是如何被处理和整合以告知情绪感知的，在很大程度上仍然未知。在这里，我们使用一种新颖的参数特定的语音变形技术来解决这个问题，该技术可以在仅 F0 或仅音色中创建具有情绪调制的刺激。我们在事件相关电位（ERP）研究中使用这些刺激以及完全调制的语音刺激，参与者在其中聆听并识别刺激情绪。ERP（P200 和 N400）和行为数据的结果一致，表明 F0 和音色都支持情绪处理，但对于不同的情绪处理方式不同：虽然 F0 与对快乐、恐惧和悲伤声音的反应最相关，但音色与对表达愉悦的声音的反应最相关。总的来说，这些发现为不同声学参数对说话者情绪的早期神经元表示的相对重要性提供了新的见解，并表明这种表示可以预测后续的评价判断。
