Acoustic Communication of Emotions: Processing of Emotional Prosody. An Investigation on Single Word Level using fMRI

Perception of emotional prosody plays an important role in every day social life. However, the underlying neuronal circuits are far from being identified. The objective of our study was to find out more about the neuronal networks involved in the processing of emotional speech on the single word level by means of fMRI. 13 young healthy subjects were tested in an auditory oddball paradigm where frequent standard words (“Anna“, p=0.7) and infrequent target words (“Anni“, p=0.1) were presented via headphones. The subjects had to press a button each time they heard the target word “Anni“. Both words, standard and th…