Emotional Prosody

Older adults are not as good as younger adults at decoding prosodic emotions. We sought to determine the specificity of this finding. Performance of older and younger adults was compared on a prosodic emotion task, a “pure” prosodic emotion task, a linguistic prosody task, and a “pure” linguistic prosody task. Older adults were less accurate at interpreting prosodic emotion cues and nonemotional contours, concurrent semantic processing worsened interpretation, and performance was further degraded when identifying negative emotions and questions. Older adults display a pervasive problem interpreting prosodic cues, but further study is required to clarify the stage at which performance declines.

Difficulties of defining "aesthetic"

A huge number of publications are devoted to aesthetic emotions; Google Scholar gives 319,000 references. Nevertheless finding a definition of what is aesthetic is not easy. Most authors use no definitions. Wikipedia (2013) gives a circular definition: "aesthetic emotions... are felt during aesthetic activity." This is similar to the "institutional theory of art" that defines art as what is considered so by an accepted art institution (Dickie, 1974). In 70 years of discussions in the Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism this theory, despite its obvious flaws, remains accepted among philosophers of art. Scientists studying emotions should aspire for a more meaningful definition, yet it is not easy to find. For example, (Juslin, 2013) devotes a special section in his work introducing aesthetic emotions as a fundamental innovation of his theory of musical emotions, yet no definition of aesthetic is given.

Parkinson’s disease patients may have difficulty decoding prosodic emotion cues. These data suggest that the basal ganglia are involved, but may reflect dorsolateral prefrontal cortex dysfunction. An auditory emotional nback task and cognitive n-back task were administered to 33 patients and 33 older adult controls, as were an auditory emotional Stroop task and cognitive Stroop task. No deficit was observed on the emotion decoding tasks; this did not alter with increased frontal lobe load. However, on the cognitive tasks, patients performed worse than older adult controls, suggesting that cognitive deficits may be more prominent. The impact of frontal lobe dysfunction on prosodic emotion cue decoding may only become apparent once frontal lobe pathology rises above a threshold.

In order to shed light on how emotions surface in language, this article addresses a gap in our empirical knowledge about 'expressive' linguistic resources. Expressive resources are classically defined as 'symptoms' or 'indices' of the speaker's emotional states at the time of speech, which suggests that they are essentially reflex – i.e. spontaneous and sincere. This article shows how actual expressive resources largely depart from this ideal type, by analyzing a case where they are performed and operate in a frame where sincerity remains largely irrelevant. Based on first-hand data, the study analyzes how expressivity combines with performance in a highly conventionalized prosodic contour used to express compassion in several Aboriginal languages of the Arnhem Land region in Australia. The form, semantics and pragmatics of this contour are described and analysed for the Dalabon (Gunwinyguan) and Kriol language (creole), and the study of how it is used shows that performance can channel elaborate communication around deep emotions such as grief. The article discusses how the performance of this 'compassionate' contour contributes to communication strategies that help the speakers deal with grief, and highlights how this performed linguistic tool channels emotional expression and management at the same time.

In linguistics, prosody is typically defined as any property of speech not limited to any specific phoneme, these properties being most typically rate of speech, intonation, intensity and intention (interrogative, declarative affirmative, declarative negative, exclamatory) plus focus (neutral, contrastive, narrow, broad focus, etc.) Intonation communicates variations of expressive meaning, such as surprise, annoyance, boredom, sadness etc. and, while intensity and rate of speech play an important role in this process, variations in these parameters do not change the semantics and pragmatics in the information as much as intonation. Thus, emotional (or affective, as some researchers refer to it) intonation should be regarded as the most important component of emotional prosody, for without it, emotions could be hardly conveyed. Also, while speech rate may not be as intimately linked to intonation, intensity (wave amplitude) and intonation have a close intertwined effect in communication, and they cannot be teased apart in analyzing natural utterances.

There is a clear confusion issue when it comes to drawing a clear line between what and what doesn’t constitute “emotional prosody”. According to Seddoh (2002), many researchers and works use the terms “affective” or “emotional” prosody and “emotional” or “affective” intonation interchangeably, just like “linguistic prosody” and “linguistic intonation” appear to be used to refer to the same phoenomenon. A dichotomy, nevertheless, exists between what is considered to be linguistic and what is considered to be emotional, with some authors (e.g., Pell & Baum, 1997; Perkins, Baran, & Gandour, 1996; Tompkins & Mateeer, 1985) believing that “affective prosody” constitutes a non-linguistic phenomenon, and others (Baum & Pell, 1997; Gandour, Larsen, Dechongkit, Ponglorpisit, & Khunadorn, 1995; Pell & Baum, 1997 inter alia) considering “linguistic prosody” to be a linguistic mechanism in the brain in language
processing. In spite of the fact that intonation contains both linguistic and emotional information, few studies have been conducted in order to understand the evidently intimate relationship between these two components of speech. The existence of this dichotomy makes it appear as if an objective, clear line could be drawn to separate the two, which is not the way to construe and study the concept of emotional prosody, in my opinion, because the components of F0, which constitute the pitch understood as “linguistic intonation” are determined not only by semantic, syntactic, morphological, phonological (segmental) and pragmatic factors, but also by non-linguistic (cultural, social, geographical, ) and physiological factors (Pierrehumbert, 1987; Seddoh, 2000), even though these last ones are not clearly understood. However, some works (Frick, 1985; Lehiste, 1996) have shown that air flowing at a higher rate through the glottis as a consequence of a high degree of tension (constriction) of the larynx and the muscles surrounding it make for a higher rate of vibration of the vocal chords, and thus translate into higher F0 values. These acoustic and perceptual changes in the articulatory system are triggered by the sympathetic nervous system upon activation of the hyppotalamus (Scherer, 1986).

As it can be seen, attempting to dissect prosody (and intonation, specifically) into two components, which are deeply intertwined and in some cases constitute the same component, is not very productive if we are to analyze naturalistic, real-life speech. As Pell et al. (2009) put it, “... research on vocally-conveyed emotions must control not only for possible cultural preferences in how emotions are naturally conveyed [facially], but also how these cues might interact with language content... “.

There have been numerous studies (Garrido et al., 1995; Llisterri et al. ,1995; Face, 2003 inter alia) using emotionless (plain) speech to study the processing of simple declarative sentences, narrow focus, broad focus, absolute and pronominal questions, etc., and many others to study the processing of emotionally-laden utterances, but few, if any, have studied a combination of both, which is the way speech is produced in real life.