The influence of speaker accent on the neurocognitive processing of politeness.

Does speaking with a foreign accent alter how listeners respond to verbal requests? Cooperative outcomes depend on multiple social factors, such as the politeness of the speaker who makes a request (e.g., their tone of voice).

An integrated empirical and computational study to decipher help-seeking behaviors and vocal stigma.

Background: Professional voice users often experience stigma associated with voice disorders and are reluctant to seek medical help. This study deployed empirical and computational tools to (1) quantify the experience of vocal stigma and help-seeking behaviors in performers; and (2) predict their modulations with peer influences in social networks.

Methods: Experience of vocal stigma and information-motivation-behavioral (IMB) skills were prospectively profiled using online surveys from a total of 403 Canadians (200 singers and actors and 203 controls).

Tracking dynamic social impressions from multidimensional voice representation.

Recent research by Lavan et al. explores how individuals form complex impressions from voices. Using electroencephalography and behavioral measures, the study identifies distinct time courses for discerning traits, with early acoustic processing preceding higher-order perception.

The Sound of Emotional Prosody: Nearly 3 Decades of Research and Future Directions.

Emotional voices attract considerable attention. A search on any browser using "emotional prosody" as a key phrase leads to more than a million entries. Such interest is evident in the scientific literature as well; readers are reminded in the introductory paragraphs of countless articles of the great importance of prosody and that listeners easily infer the emotional state of speakers through acoustic information.

The vocal side of empathy: neural correlates of pain perception in spoken complaints.

In the extensive neuroimaging literature on empathy for pain, few studies have investigated how this phenomenon may relate to everyday social situations such as spoken interactions. The present study used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to assess how complaints, as vocal expressions of pain, are empathically processed by listeners and how these empathic responses may vary based on speakers' vocal expression and cultural identity. Twenty-four French participants listened to short utterances describing a painful event, which were either produced in a neutral-sounding or complaining voice by both in-group (French) and out-group (French Canadian) speakers.

Complain like you mean it! How prosody conveys suffering even about innocuous events.

When complaining, speakers can use their voice to convey a feeling of pain, even when describing innocuous events. Rapid detection of emotive and identity features of the voice may constrain how the semantic content of complaints is processed, as indexed by N400 and P600 effects evoked by the final, pain-related word. Twenty-six participants listened to statements describing painful and innocuous events expressed in a neutral or complaining voice, produced by ingroup and outgroup accented speakers.

Cultural differences in vocal expression analysis: Effects of task, language, and stimulus-related factors.

Cultural context shapes the way that emotions are expressed and socially interpreted. Building on previous research looking at cultural differences in judgements of facial expressions, we examined how listeners recognize speech-embedded emotional expressions and make inferences about a speaker's feelings in relation to their vocal display. Canadian and Chinese participants categorized vocal expressions of emotions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness) expressed at different intensity levels in three languages (English, Mandarin, Hindi).

Listen to my feelings! How prosody and accent drive the empathic relevance of complaining speech.

Interpersonal communication often involves sharing our feelings with others; complaining, for example, aims to elicit empathy in listeners by vocally expressing a speaker's suffering. Despite the growing neuroscientific interest in the phenomenon of empathy, few have investigated how it is elicited in real time by vocal signals (prosody), and how this might be affected by interpersonal factors, such as a speaker's cultural background (based on their accent). To investigate the neural processes at play when hearing spoken complaints, twenty-six French participants listened to complaining and neutral utterances produced by in-group French and out-group Québécois (i.

Social decision-making in Parkinson's disease.

Introduction: Parkinson's Disease (PD) commonly affects cognition and communicative functions, including the ability to perceive socially meaningful cues from nonverbal behavior and spoken language (e.g., a speaker's tone of voice).

Emotional voices modulate perception and predictions about an upcoming face.

When we hear an emotional voice, does this alter how the brain perceives and evaluates a subsequent face? Here, we tested this question by comparing event-related potentials evoked by angry, sad, and happy faces following vocal expressions which varied in form (speech-embedded emotions, non-linguistic vocalizations) and emotional relationship (congruent, incongruent). Participants judged whether face targets were true exemplars of emotion (facial affect decision). Prototypicality decisions were more accurate and faster for congruent vs.

Social appropriateness perception of dynamic interactions.

The current study explored the judgment of communicative appropriateness while processing a dialogue between two individuals. All stimuli were presented as audio-visual as well as audio-only vignettes and 24 young adults reported their social impression (appropriateness) of literal, blunt, sarcastic, and teasing statements. On average, teasing statements were rated as more appropriate when processing audio-visual statements compared to the audio-only version of a stimuli, while sarcastic statements were judged as less appropriate with additional visual information.

Cortical processing of speaker politeness: Tracking the dynamic effects of voice tone and politeness markers.

Information in the tone of voice alters social impressions and underlying brain activity as listeners evaluate the interpersonal relevance of utterances. Here, we presented requests that expressed politeness distinctions through the voice (polite/rude) and explicit linguistic markers (half of the requests began with ). Thirty participants performed a social perception task (rating friendliness) while their electroencephalogram was recorded.

Unattended Emotional Prosody Affects Visual Processing of Facial Expressions in Mandarin-Speaking Chinese: A Comparison With English-Speaking Canadians.

Emotional cues from different modalities have to be integrated during communication, a process that can be shaped by an individual's cultural background. We explored this issue in 25 Chinese participants by examining how listening to emotional prosody in Mandarin influenced participants' gazes at emotional faces in a modified visual search task. We also conducted a cross-cultural comparison between data of this study and that of our previous work in English-speaking Canadians using analogous methodology.

Emotivity in the Voice: Prosodic, Lexical, and Cultural Appraisal of Complaining Speech.

Emotive speech is a social act in which a speaker displays emotional signals with a specific intention; in the case of third-party complaints, this intention is to elicit empathy in the listener. The present study assessed how the emotivity of complaints was perceived in various conditions. Participants listened to short statements describing painful or neutral situations, spoken with a complaining or neutral prosody, and evaluated how complaining the speaker sounded.

Immediate online use of prosody reveals the ironic intentions of a speaker: neurophysiological evidence.

In social interactions, speakers often use their tone of voice ("prosody") to communicate their interpersonal stance to pragmatically mark an ironic intention (e.g., sarcasm).

Neurophysiological correlates of sexually evocative speech.

Speakers modulate their voice (prosody) to communicate non-literal meanings, such as sexual innuendo (She inspected his package this morning, where "package" could refer to a man's penis). Here, we analyzed event-related potentials to illuminate how listeners use prosody to interpret sexual innuendo and what neurocognitive processes are involved. Participants listened to third-party statements with literal or 'sexual' interpretations, uttered in an unmarked or sexually evocative tone.

Neural responses to interpersonal requests: Effects of imposition and vocally-expressed stance.

The way that speakers communicate their stance towards the listener is often vital for understanding the interpersonal relevance of speech acts, such as basic requests. To establish how interpersonal dimensions of an utterance affect neurocognitive processing, we compared event-related potentials elicited by requests that linguistically varied in how much they imposed on listeners (e.g.

To believe or not to believe? How voice and accent information in speech alter listener impressions of trust.

Our decision to believe what another person says can be influenced by vocally expressed confidence in speech and by whether the speaker-listener are members of the same social group. The dynamic effects of these two information sources on neurocognitive processes that promote believability impressions from vocal cues are unclear. Here, English Canadian listeners were presented personal statements () produced in a confident or doubtful voice by speakers of their own dialect (in-group) or speakers from two different "out-groups" (regional or foreign-accented English).

Neural architecture underlying person perception from in-group and out-group voices.

In spoken language, verbal cues (what we say) and vocal cues (how we say it) contribute to person perception, the process for interpreting information and making inferences about other people. When someone has an accent, forming impressions from the speaker's voice may be influenced by social categorization processes (i.e.

Dynamic Facial Expressions Prime the Processing of Emotional Prosody.

Evidence suggests that emotion is represented supramodally in the human brain. Emotional facial expressions, which often precede vocally expressed emotion in real life, can modulate event-related potentials (N100 and P200) during emotional prosody processing. To investigate these cross-modal emotional interactions, two lines of research have been put forward: cross-modal integration and cross-modal priming.

The development of cross-cultural recognition of vocal emotion during childhood and adolescence.

Humans have an innate set of emotions recognised universally. However, emotion recognition also depends on socio-cultural rules. Although adults recognise vocal emotions universally, they identify emotions more accurately in their native language.

Unaltered emotional experience in Parkinson's disease: Pupillometry and behavioral evidence.

Introduction: Recognizing emotions in others is a pivotal part of socioemotional functioning and plays a central role in social interactions. It has been shown that individuals suffering from Parkinson's disease (PD) are less accurate at identifying basic emotions such as fear, sadness, and happiness; however, previous studies have predominantly assessed emotion processing using unimodal stimuli (e.g.

Neural systems for evaluating speaker (Un)believability.

Our voice provides salient cues about how confident we sound, which promotes inferences about how believable we are. However, the neural mechanisms involved in these social inferences are largely unknown. Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined the brain networks and individual differences underlying the evaluation of speaker believability from vocal expressions.

Cultural immersion alters emotion perception: Neurophysiological evidence from Chinese immigrants to Canada.

To explore how cultural immersion modulates emotion processing, this study examined how Chinese immigrants to Canada process multisensory emotional expressions, which were compared to existing data from two groups, Chinese and North Americans. Stroop and Oddball paradigms were employed to examine different stages of emotion processing. The Stroop task presented face-voice pairs expressing congruent/incongruent emotions and participants actively judged the emotion of one modality while ignoring the other.

When emotion and expression diverge: The social costs of Parkinson's disease.

Introduction: Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) are perceived more negatively than their healthy peers, yet it remains unclear what factors contribute to this negative social perception.

Method: Based on a cohort of 17 PD patients and 20 healthy controls, we assessed how naïve raters judge the emotion and emotional intensity displayed in dynamic facial expressions as adults with and without PD watched emotionally evocative films (Experiment 1), and how age-matched peers naïve to patients' disease status judge their social desirability along various dimensions from audiovisual stimuli (interview excerpts) recorded after certain films (Experiment 2).

Results: In Experiment 1, participants with PD were rated as significantly more facially expressive than healthy controls; moreover, ratings demonstrated that PD patients were routinely mistaken for experiencing a negative emotion, whereas controls were rated as displaying a more positive emotion than they reported feeling.