Emotional expressions provide strong signals in social interactions and can function as emotion inducers in a perceiver. Although speech provides one of the most important channels for human communication, its physiological correlates, such as activations of the autonomous nervous system (ANS) while listening to spoken utterances, have received far less attention than in other domains of emotion processing. Our study aimed at filling this gap by investigating autonomic activation in response to spoken utterances that were embedded into larger semantic contexts. (...) Emotional salience was manipulated by providing information on alleged speaker similarity. We compared these autonomic responses to activations triggered by affective sounds, such as exploding bombs, and applause. These sounds had been rated and validated as being either positive, negative, or neutral. As physiological markers of ANS activity, we recorded skin conductance responses (SCRs) and changes of pupil size while participants classified both prosodic and sound stimuli according to their hedonic valence. As expected, affective sounds elicited increased arousal in the receiver, as reflected in increased SCR and pupil size. In contrast, SCRs to angry and joyful prosodic expressions did not differ from responses to neutral ones. Pupil size, however, was modulated by affective prosodic utterances, with increased dilations for angry and joyful compared to neutral prosody, although the similarity manipulation had no effect. These results indicate that cues provided by emotional prosody in spoken semantically neutral utterances might be too subtle to trigger SCR, although variation in pupil size indicated the salience of stimulus variation. Our findings further demonstrate a functional dissociation between pupil dilation and skin conductance that presumably origins from their differential innervation. (shrink)

People seem to differ in their visual search performance involving emotionally expressive faces when these expressions are seen on faces of others close to their age compared to faces of non-peers, known as the own-age bias. This study sought to compare search advantages in angry and happy faces detected on faces of adults and children on a pool of children and adults. The goals of this study were to examine the developmental trajectory of expression recognition and examine the development of (...) an OAB. Participants were asked to find a target face displaying an emotional expression among eight neutral faces. Results showed that children and adults found happy faces significantly faster than angry and fearful faces regardless of it being present on the faces of peers or non-peers. Adults responded faster to the faces of peers regardless of the expression. Furthermore, while children detected angry faces significantly faster compared to fearful ones, we found no such difference in adults. In contrast, adults detected all expressions significantly faster when they appeared on the faces of other adults compared to the faces of children. In sum, we found evidence for development in detecting facial expressions and also an age-dependent increase in OAB. We suggest that the happy face could have an advantage in visual processing due to its importance in social situations and its overall higher frequency compared to other emotional expressions. Although we only found some evidence on the OAB, using peer or non-peer faces should be a theoretical consideration of future research because the same emotion displayed on non-peers’ compared to peers’ faces may have different implications and meanings to the perceiver. (shrink)

The conflicting findings from the few studies conducted with regard to gender differences in the recognition of vocal expressions of emotion have left the exact nature of these differences unclear. Several investigators have argued that a comprehensive understanding of gender differences in vocal emotion recognition can only be achieved by replicating these studies while accounting for influential factors such as stimulus type, gender-balanced samples, number of encoders, decoders, and emotional categories. This study aimed to account for these factors by investigating (...) whether emotion recognition from vocal expressions differs as a function of both listeners' and speakers' gender. A total of N = 290 participants were randomly and equally allocated to two groups. One group listened to words and pseudo-words, while the other group listened to sentences and affect bursts. Participants were asked to categorize the stimuli with respect to the expressed emotions in a fixed-choice response format. Overall, females were more accurate than males when decoding vocal emotions, however, when testing for specific emotions these differences were small in magnitude. Speakers' gender had a significant impact on how listeners' judged emotions from the voice. The group listening to words and pseudo-words had higher identification rates for emotions spoken by male than by female actors, whereas in the group listening to sentences and affect bursts the identification rates were higher when emotions were uttered by female than male actors. The mixed pattern for emotion-specific effects, however, indicates that, in the vocal channel, the reliability of emotion judgments is not systematically influenced by speakers' gender and the related stereotypes of emotional expressivity. Together, these results extend previous findings by showing effects of listeners' and speakers' gender on the recognition of vocal emotions. They stress the importance of distinguishing these factors to explain recognition ability in the processing of emotional prosody. (shrink)

Faces are highly salient objects for humans, providing identity- and emotion-related information—basic cues for mastering social interactions. Despite extensive research on the recognition of facia...

In so-called garden-path jokes, an initial semantic representation is violated, and semantic revision reestablishes a coherent representation. 48 jokes were manipulated in three conditions: (i) a coherent ending, (ii) a joke ending, and (iii) a discourse-incoherent ending. A reading times study ( N = 24) and three studies with recordings of ERP and pupil changes ( N = 21, 24, and 24, respectively) supported the hypothesized cognitive processes. Jokes showed increased reading times of the final word compared to coherent endings. (...) ERP data mainly indicated semantic integration difficulties (N400). Larger pupil diameters to joke endings presumably reflect emotional responses. ERP evidence for increased discourse processing efforts and emotional responses, as assumed to be reflected in modulations of the late left anterior negativity (LLAN) and in an enhanced late frontal positivity (fP600), respectively, remains however incomplete. Processing of incoherent endings was also accompanied by increased reading times, a stronger and sustained N400, and context-sensitive P600 effects. Together, these findings provide evidence for a sequential, non-monotonic, and incremental discourse comprehension of garden-path jokes. (shrink)