Gender differences in the activation of inferior frontal cortex during emotional speech perception

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2003.10.048

NeuroImage

Volume 21, Issue 3, March 2004, Pages 1114-1123

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2003.10.048 Get rights and content

Abstract

We investigated the brain regions that mediate the processing of emotional speech in men and women by presenting positive and negative words that were spoken with happy or angry prosody. Hence, emotional prosody and word valence were either congruous or incongruous. We assumed that an fRMI contrast between congruous and incongruous presentations would reveal the structures that mediate the interaction of emotional prosody and word valence. The left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) was more strongly activated in incongruous as compared to congruous trials. This difference in IFG activity was significantly larger in women than in men. Moreover, the congruence effect was significant in women whereas it only appeared as a tendency in men. As the left IFG has been repeatedly implicated in semantic processing, these findings are taken as evidence that semantic processing in women is more susceptible to influences from emotional prosody than is semantic processing in men. Moreover, the present data suggest that the left IFG mediates increased semantic processing demands imposed by an incongruence between emotional prosody and word valence.

Section snippets

Participants

Twenty-seven right handed native German speakers participated in the experiment. Two participants were excluded because of head movements in the scanner. One participant was excluded based on an insufficient number of correct responses. Twelve of the remaining subjects were female and had a mean age of 24.3 years (SD = 2.4). Male subjects had a mean age of 26.3 (SD = 3.5).

Material

The stimulus material consisted of 74 positive and 74 negative verbs. Word valence had been obtained in an earlier rating

Behavioral results

For reaction time and accuracy measures, separate ANOVAs treating Task (prosodic, propositional), Word Valence (positive, negative), and Prosody (happy, angry) as repeated measures factors and Sex as a between subjects factor were conducted. Any effects of congruence should result in a significant Word Valence by Prosody interaction. In this case, happily spoken positive words and angrily spoken negative words (i.e., congruent trials) should differ from happily spoken negative words and angrily

Interaction of emotional prosody and word valence in the brain

The main question that we addressed here was whether the structures that were found to be involved in semantic processing also mediate the interaction of prosodic and word information in speech. However, as we asked participants to either focus on prosody or word information, we assumed that only women would show such an interaction in brain areas related to semantic processing. This assumption was based on recent ERP findings Schirmer and Kotz, 2003, Schirmer et al., 2002 that suggested sex

Acknowledgements

We thank Trevor B. Penney and Angela D. Friederici for helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

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Gender differences in the activation of inferior frontal cortex during emotional speech perception

Abstract

Section snippets

Participants

Material

Behavioral results

Interaction of emotional prosody and word valence in the brain

Acknowledgements

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Prog. Brain Res.

Brain Lang.

Cogn. Brain Res.

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Comput. Med. Imaging Grap.

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Neuropsychologia

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Med. Imag. Anal.

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