Neural correlates of embodied and vibratory mechanisms associated with emotional prosody production.

Despite a large body of literature on the psychological and brain mechanisms of vocal emotion perception, less is known on expression and production mechanisms, especially the vibrations originating in the vocal cords and their role in emotional voice production. In the present study, we aimed to fill this gap. Participants were asked to produce angry, happy and neutral tone emotional vocalizations in different production conditions ('normal', 'whisper', 'silent articulation').

Categorization and discrimination of human and non-human primate affective vocalizations: Investigation of frontal cortex activity through fNIRS.

Previous research has highlighted the involvement of frontal regions in human participants while they engaged in the explicit decoding, such as categorization (AB) and discrimination (Anon-A), of affective signals. Given its adaptive value and deep evolutionary history, this human capacity to recognize the affective content in human calls is likely to extend to the vocalizations of other closely related species, such as non-human primates. However, few comparative studies have thus far investigated this process at both the behavioral and neural levels.

Nanostructuring copper thin film electrodes for CO electroreduction to C products.

The electrochemical CO reduction reaction (CORR) is a promising approach for achieving carbon-neutral processes in the chemical industry. In this context, various nanostructures have been reported to enhance the C selectivity of Cu-based catalysts. Here, we prepared Cu nanoneedles (NN) from 300 nm sputtered Cu thin films through anodization under various conditions and investigated their performance in terms of C product selectivity.

Electrochemical restructuring of HO activated copper selenide for CO reduction.

Copper chalcogenides such as CuSe, acknowledged as efficient CO reduction catalysts, do not represent the active phases but rather are precursors or pre-catalysts as they undergo significant transformations under reaction conditions. In this work we have tailored the initial structure of CuSe to steer structural evolution under catalytic conditions and facilitate the generation of the active phases. As-prepared CuSe nanowires were reconstructed through HO and electrochemical treatments, yielding distinct pre-catalysts.

Maternal and paternal infant directed speech is modulated by the child's age in in two and three person interactions.

Prosody in infant-directed speech (IDS) serves important functions for the infant's attention, regulation, and emotional expression. However, how the structural characteristics of this vocal signal are influenced by the presence or absence of one or two parents at different infant ages remains under-investigated. This study aimed to identify the acoustic characteristics of parental vocalizations in 69 families during specific phases of the Lausanne Trilogue Play (LTP) setting.

Maternal singing and speech have beneficial effects on preterm infant's general movements at term equivalent age and at 3 months: an RCT.

Background: General Movements (GMs) are part of the spontaneous movement repertoire and assessing them helps to determine the integrity of the central nervous system in newborns. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of maternal singing and speaking in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) on preterm infants' GMs at term equivalent age and at 3 months.

Methods: In this multi-center randomized clinical trial, 56 stable preterm infants (25-32 weeks) were randomized to either an intervention group - in which mothers were asked to speak and sing to their infants for 20 min, 3 times per week, for 2 weeks - or to a control group.

Differential Effects of Disease Duration and Dopaminergic Replacement Therapy on Vocal Emotion Recognition in Asymmetric Parkinson's Disease.

Introduction: Recently, studies have suggested a role of motor symptom asymmetry on impaired emotional recognition abilities in Parkinson's disease with a greater vulnerability in patients with a predominance of left-sided symptoms. However, none of them explored the interaction between motor symptom asymmetry and dopamine replacement therapy in different stages of the disease.

Methodology: We explored the recognition of vocal emotion (i.

AuCu bimetallic nanocluster-modified titania nanotubes for photoelectrochemical water splitting: composition-dependent atomic arrangement and activity.

The photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting reaction of bimetallic AuCu ( = 1, 0.75, 0.5, 0.

Newborn's neural representation of instrumental and vocal music as revealed by fMRI: A dynamic effective brain connectivity study.

Music is ubiquitous, both in its instrumental and vocal forms. While speech perception at birth has been at the core of an extensive corpus of research, the origins of the ability to discriminate instrumental or vocal melodies is still not well investigated. In previous studies comparing vocal and musical perception, the vocal stimuli were mainly related to speaking, including language, and not to the non-language singing voice.

Social context and drug cues modulate inhibitory control in cocaine addiction: involvement of the STN evidenced through functional MRI.

Addictions often develop in a social context, although the influence of social factors did not receive much attention in the neuroscience of addiction. Recent animal studies suggest that peer presence can reduce cocaine intake, an influence potentially mediated, among others, by the subthalamic nucleus (STN). However, there is to date no neurobiological study investigating this mediation in humans.

Maternal singing reduced pain indexes in 2-month-old infants and increased proximity during vaccinations.

Aim: Immunisation is a global health priority, but methods of non-pharmacological pain relief are not widely used in routine clinical practice. In this study, we set out to investigate the effects of maternal singing during the routine vaccination of infants.

Methods: We recruited 67 mother-infant pairs at Health Centres in the Aosta Region of Italy.

Maternal singing sustains preterm hospitalized newborns' autonomic nervous system maturation: an RCT.

Background: Premature birth is known to affect the newborn's autonomic nervous system (ANS) maturation, with potential short and long-term impact on their neurobehavioral development. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of maternal directed singing and speaking on the preterm infants' autonomic nervous system (ANS) maturation as measured by the heart rate variability (HRV) parameters.

Methods: In this multi-center randomized clinical trial, 30 stable preterm infants (m = 29,6 weeks of gestational age), without any abnormalities were randomized into an intervention (16) or a control group (14).

Frontal mechanisms underlying primate calls recognition by humans.

Introduction: The ability to process verbal language seems unique to humans and relies not only on semantics but on other forms of communication such as affective vocalizations, that we share with other primate species-particularly great apes ().

Methods: To better understand these processes at the behavioral and brain level, we asked human participants to categorize vocalizations of four primate species including human, great apes (chimpanzee and bonobo), and monkey (rhesus macaque) during MRI acquisition.

Results: Classification was above chance level for all species but bonobo vocalizations.

Preterm infants show an atypical processing of the mother's voice.

To understand the consequences of prematurity on language perception, it is fundamental to determine how atypical early sensory experience affects brain development. At term equivalent age, ten preterm and ten full-term newborns underwent high-density EEG during mother or stranger speech presentation, in the forward or backward order. A general group effect terms > preterms is evident in the theta frequency band, in the left temporal area, with preterms showing significant activation for strangers' and terms for the mother's voice.

CoFeO inverse opals with tunable catalytic activity for high-performance overall water splitting.

The development of earth-abundant and high-performance bifunctional catalysts for both the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in alkaline electrolytes is required to efficiently produce hydrogen by electrochemical water splitting, but remains a challenge. We have fabricated mesoporous cobalt iron oxide inverse opals (m-CFO IO) with different mole ratios of cobalt and iron by a wet chemical method using polystyrene beads as a hard template, followed by calcination in air. The performance of the m-CFO IO as OER and HER electrocatalysts was investigated.

Gas phase deposition of well-defined bimetallic gold-silver clusters for photocatalytic applications.

Cluster beam deposition is employed for fabricating well-defined bimetallic plasmonic photocatalysts to enhance their activity while facilitating a more fundamental understanding of their properties. AuAg clusters with compositions ( = 0, 0.1, 0.

Oxytocin Levels Increase and Anxiety Decreases in Mothers Who Sing and Talk to Their Premature Infants during a Painful Procedure.

(1) Background: Preterm infants spend their first weeks of life in the hospital partially separated from their parents and subjected to frequent potentially painful clinical procedures. Previous research has found that early vocal contact reduces infant pain perception while simultaneously increasing oxytocin (OXT) levels. The current study aims to assess the effect of maternal singing and speaking on mothers.

Dysfunctional cerebello-cerebral network associated with vocal emotion recognition impairments.

Vocal emotion recognition, a key determinant to analyzing a speaker's emotional state, is known to be impaired following cerebellar dysfunctions. Nevertheless, its possible functional integration in the large-scale brain network subtending emotional prosody recognition has yet to be explored. We administered an emotional prosody recognition task to patients with right versus left-hemispheric cerebellar lesions and a group of matched controls.

Influence of bodily resonances on emotional prosody perception.

Introduction: Emotional prosody is defined as suprasegmental and segmental changes in the human voice and related acoustic parameters that can inform the listener about the emotional state of the speaker. While the processing of emotional prosody is well represented in the literature, the mechanism of embodied cognition in emotional voice perception is very little studied. This study aimed to investigate the influence of induced bodily vibrations-through a vibrator placed close to the vocal cords-in the perception of emotional vocalizations.

Cerebral Activity in Female Baboons () During the Perception of Conspecific and Heterospecific Agonistic Vocalizations: a Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy Study.

Unlabelled: The "voice areas" in the superior temporal cortex have been identified in both humans and non-human primates as selective to conspecific vocalizations only (i.e., expressed by members of our own species), suggesting its old evolutionary roots across the primate lineage.