Gender Differences in Processing Emotional Prosody

Social interaction requires appropriate understanding and processing of emotional communicative facets. This allows to infere which emotional state a person is in as well as to predict their actions and to adapt ones own behaviour. In speech there are two channels for encoding emotions: 1) semantics – that is the emotional meaning of words and sentences, and 2) prosody – that is the emotional melody of speech. To date, the neural basis of emotional prosodic and semantic information processing is not completely understood. However, we know that the inferior frontal (IFG) and the superior and middle temporal gyri (STG, MTG) play a decisive role in emotional speech processing. For processing semantic anomalies left and bilateral IFG activations and right and bilateral STG/ MTG activatons are reported. In comparison, similar but more right-accentuated activations are reported for prosodic processing. These results are not unanimous, and some studies even implicate gender differences in speech processing. The aim of the current study was to further specify 1) which brain areas are processing and integrating emotional semantic and emotional prosodic information, respectively, and 2) to investigate gender specific differences in the processing and interaction of the two information types. Twenty native German, right-handed participants (ten female) listened to 256 sentences via headphones. Each sentence was spoken by a trained female speaker of German with three intonation contours and three semantic contents (negative, positive or neutral) in either matching or mismatching conditions. All sentences were presented in a pseudorandomized order. Participants were asked to evaluate via button press whether they had listened to negative, positive or neutral emotional prosody. For each sentence two functional MR images were acquired (18 slices, TR 3.5s). Overall, female participants responded more correctly than male participants. Functional MR reveals brain activations in the IFG, STG, MTG bilaterally and in additional several frontal areas. Activation of the IFG bilaterally in mismatch vs. match conditions show gender differences. The results will be discussed with respect to proposed networks underlying emotional prosodic processing.