Emotional prosody production in brain -damaged populations: Human judgments and acoustical analysis.
Item
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Title
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Emotional prosody production in brain -damaged populations: Human judgments and acoustical analysis.
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Identifier
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AAI3103167
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identifier
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3103167
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Creator
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Schmidt, J. Michael.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Joan C. Borod
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Psychobiology
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Abstract
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This study investigated two areas of emotion: acoustical parameters used to communicate discrete emotions and brain structures involved in the expression of prosodic emotion. Further, the right-hemisphere, valence, motoric direction, and cue-lateralization emotional communication hypotheses were tested. Speech samples (n = 796) produced by 20 right brain-damaged, 17 left brain-damaged, and 18 demographically matched normal control adult men and women were selected from happy, sad, angry, and neutral monologues, low-pass filtered to eliminate language cues, and presented to 14 naive judges who rated the speech samples for emotional intensity and emotion-type identification. Additionally, these samples underwent computerized acoustical analysis to measure pitch, duration, and volume. Analyses revealed that pitch mean and standard deviation, volume standard deviation, and speech rate were greatest for the expression of happiness and smallest for sadness. Anger was also associated with high pitch mean and standard deviation level, as well as smaller volume standard deviation and slower speech rate. Raters judged the left-frontal patients to be the most impaired group followed by the right-frontal and right-subcortical patients. Acoustical analysis revealed that left-frontal patients had significant difficulty with duration cues including slower speech rates and more silence in their samples than normal controls, providing some support for the cue-lateralization hypothesis. Although not statistically significant, right-frontal and right-subcortical patients used less pitch variation in their speech, consistent with findings in the literature regarding the ability to modulate pitch range. Left subcortical patients did not demonstrate prosodic impairment. In addition, analyses suggested that men and women used pitch and duration cues differently to express prosodic emotion and that women had a happy tone whereas men an angry tone when speaking about a neutral topic. These findings support the notion that frontostriatal circuitry, not just subcortical structures, is critical for prosodic emotion production.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
