What is the impact of prosody and semantics on emotion processing?
Francesca Carbone
Abstract:
Listeners use both semantic and prosodic information to infer speakers’ emotional states. Although
this fact has been widely confirmed, the relative influence of prosody and semantics on emotion
processing is still debated. We report the first study comparing the effects of emotional semantics,
emotional prosody and their interaction on skin conductance responses (SCRs). We also explored
whether women have higher sensitivity to threatening stimuli, reflected in larger SCRs than men. A
corpus of 28 utterances was produced by a professional actress who rendered the emotions through
semantics only, through prosody only and through the combination of semantic and prosodic cues.
Seventy-seven native French listeners judged the arousal and valence of the utterances while their
SCRs were collected. Angry prosody triggered the highest SCRs, while there was no effect of
emotional semantics. This supports the hypothesis that prosody is ontogenetically older and more
relevant for adaptative functions than semantics. These effects were limited to women, confirming
that women have a lower threshold for detecting signals of danger, probably as a consequence of sex
specific evolutionary pressures. We aim to expand the study by testing how listeners’ personality
traits (i.e., differences in degree of empathy) modulate emotional evaluation and interact with
listeners’ sex.
