The neural correlates of emotional prosody comprehension: disentangling simple from complex emotion

Abstract

Background: Emotional prosody comprehension (EPC), the ability to interpret another person's feelings by listening to their tone of voice, is crucial for effective social communication. Previous studies assessing the neural correlates of EPC have found inconsistent results, particularly regarding the involvement of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). It remained unclear whether the involvement of the mPFC is linked to an increased demand in socio-cognitive components of EPC such as mental state attribution and if basic perceptual processing of EPC can be performed without the contribution of this region.

Methods: fMRI was used to delineate neural activity during the perception of prosodic stimuli conveying simple and complex emotion. Emotional trials in general, as compared to neutral ones, activated a network comprising temporal and lateral frontal brain regions, while complex emotion trials specifically showed an additional involvement of the mPFC, premotor cortex, frontal operculum and left insula.

Conclusion: These results indicate that the mPFC and premotor areas might be associated, but are not crucial to EPC. However, the mPFC supports socio-cognitive skills necessary to interpret complex emotion such as inferring mental states. Additionally, the premotor cortex involvement may reflect the participation of the mirror neuron system for prosody processing particularly of complex emotion.

Figure 1. Regions involved in prosody for simple and complex emotion.

Brain regions showing significantly stronger activations for simple and complex emotion as opposed to neutral trails. Activations are shown for p<0.05, corrected for multiple comparisons.

Figure 2. Regions involved in prosody for complex emotion.

Brain regions showing significantly stronger activations for complex as opposed to simple emotion. The activation maps (at p<0.05, corrected for multiple comparisons) are shown overlaid onto a canonical brain rendered in three dimensions (A). The anatomical location of the medial frontal activation (at p<0.05, corrected for multiple comparisons) is shown overlaid onto the mean high-resolution T1 scan of the group (B). In (C) activations for the standard analysis are shown in yellow and activations corrected for confounding effects of pitch between conditions are shown in red with the overlap of the standard analysis and the analysis corrected for pitch shown in orange.