Vocal Cues Underlying Youth and Adult Portrayals of Socio-emotional Expressions

Morningstar, Michele; Dirks, Melanie A.; Huang, Shi‐Ming

doi:10.1007/s10919-017-0250-7

Cited by 24 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…The observed female advantage for emotional categorization echoes numerous studies in adults and children focusing on different channels of emotion communication, including faces 7 , 52 , 53 , 69 – 71 , body movements 72 , 73 , voice and prosody 49 , 74 – 76 . Although robust in meta-analyses 20 , 21 , this effect is small and not always apparent in individual studies.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

Categorical emotion recognition from voice improves during childhood and adolescence

Grosbras

Ross

Belin

2018

Sci Rep

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Converging evidence demonstrates that emotion processing from facial expressions continues to improve throughout childhood and part of adolescence. Here we investigated whether this is also the case for emotions conveyed by non-linguistic vocal expressions, another key aspect of social interactions. We tested 225 children and adolescents (age 5–17) and 30 adults in a forced-choice labeling task using vocal bursts expressing four basic emotions (anger, fear, happiness and sadness). Mixed-model logistic regressions revealed a small but highly significant change with age, mainly driven by changes in the ability to identify anger and fear. Adult-level of performance was reached between 14 and 15 years of age. Also, across ages, female participants obtained better scores than male participants, with no significant interaction between age and sex effects. These results expand the findings showing that affective prosody understanding improves during childhood; they document, for the first time, continued improvement in vocal affect recognition from early childhood to mid- adolescence, a pivotal period for social maturation.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

Categorical emotion recognition from voice improves during childhood and adolescence

Grosbras

Ross

Belin

2018

Sci Rep

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“…Audio stimuli were selected from a set of recordings produced by three 13-year-old community-based actors (2 females), generated with the aid of emotional vignettes (Morningstar, Dirks, & Huang, 2017). Actors spoke the same five sentences (e.g., "Why did you do that?…”

Section: Stimuli and Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Alternatively, it is possible that youth show less functional specialization in the processing of different vocal emotion patterns than would adults; though this hypothesis is strictly speculative, it would be in line with theoretical predictions of the Interactive Specialization model (Johnson et al, 2009) and previous findings regarding the development of nonemotional voice processing in the superior temporal cortex (Bonte et al, 2013;Bonte et al, 2016). Yet another possibility is that youth-produced vocal emotions, which have been found to be less distinct from one another in pitch (Morningstar et al, 2017), may not elicit as strong emotionspecific responses in the brain as would adult-produced stimuli. Future work should investigate whether emotion-specific responses to affective prosody vary depending on factors such as the age of the listener or speaker.…”

Section: Strengths and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-related differences in neural activation and functional connectivity during the processing of vocal prosody in adolescence

Morningstar

Mattson

Venticinque

et al. 2019

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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The ability to recognize others' emotions based on vocal emotional prosody follows a protracted developmental trajectory during adolescence. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms supporting this maturation. The current study investigated age-related differences in neural activation during a vocal emotion recognition (ER) task. Listeners aged 8 to 19 years old completed the vocal ER task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The task of categorizing vocal emotional prosody elicited activation primarily in temporal and frontal areas. Age was associated with a) greater activation in regions in the superior, middle, and inferior frontal gyri, b) greater functional connectivity between the left precentral and inferior frontal gyri and regions in the bilateral insula and temporo-parietal junction, and c) greater fractional anisotropy in the superior longitudinal fasciculus, which connects frontal areas to posterior temporo-parietal regions. Many of these age-related differences in brain activation and connectivity were associated with better performance on the ER task. Increased activation in, and connectivity between, areas typically involved in language processing and social cognition may facilitate the development of vocal ER skills in adolescence.

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“…For these reasons, it is crucial for youth to be able to parse these cues accurately. Additionally, meanness and friendliness have been shown to be acoustically distinct from emotions like anger and happiness (Morningstar, Huang, & Dirks, 2017;Noble & Xu, 2011), and there is evidence that social expressions are processed differently than basic emotions at a neural level (e.g., Adolphs, Baron-Cohen, & Tranel, 2002). Including meanness and friendliness in our stimulus set thus allowed for a deeper understanding of youth's interpretation of socially relevant affective cues.…”

Section: Goals and Hypotheses Of The Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Associations Between Anxious and Depressive Symptoms and the Recognition of Vocal Socioemotional Expressions in Youth

Morningstar

Dirks

Rappaport

et al. 2017

Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology

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The current study examined the associations between internalizing symptoms and adolescents' recognition of vocal socioemotional expressions produced by youth. Fifty-seven youth (8-17 years old, M = 12.62, SD = 2.66; 29 anxious, 28 nonanxious; 32 female, 25 male) were asked to identify the intended expression in auditory recordings of youth's portrayals of basic emotions and social attitudes. Recognition accuracy increased with age, suggesting that the ability to recognize vocal affect continues to develop into adolescence. Anxiety symptoms were not associated with recognition ability, but youth's depressive symptoms were related to poorer identification of anger and happiness. Youth experiencing symptoms of depression may be likely to misinterpret vocal expressions of happiness and anger.

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Vocal Cues Underlying Youth and Adult Portrayals of Socio-emotional Expressions

Cited by 24 publications

References 71 publications

Categorical emotion recognition from voice improves during childhood and adolescence

Categorical emotion recognition from voice improves during childhood and adolescence

Age-related differences in neural activation and functional connectivity during the processing of vocal prosody in adolescence

Associations Between Anxious and Depressive Symptoms and the Recognition of Vocal Socioemotional Expressions in Youth

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