EfMRI evidence for implicit emotional prosodic processing

Abstract

The current efMRI experiment investigated the potential right hemisphere dominance of emotional prosodic processing under implicit task demands. Participants evaluated the relative tonal height (high, medium, low) of intelligible and unintelligible sentences spoken by a trained female speaker of German with three prosodic contours: happy, angry, and neutral. The results confirm the activation of a bilateral frontostriato- temporal network with no clear right hemispheric preference for emotional prosodic processing. The data suggest that (1) task demands do not significantly alter lateralization of function in the current context, and (2) frontostriatal brain areas engage during implicit processing of emotional prosody, thus do no seem to be task specific.