Is the medium the message?: Comment on 'Emotional voices in context: A neurobiological model of multimodal affective information processing' by Brück et al.

摘要

The saying "It's not what you say, but how you say it" nicely reflects the dual nature of speech. Sometimes, the medium itself is the message as the emotional aspects encoded in intensity, tempo, pausing, pitch and frequency of vocalization are more than just by-products of speech and convey affective meaning. The review of Brück and colleagues [1] expands the scope of speech and voice comprehension by putting its emotional content at the forefront. This praiseworthy approach summarizes the significance of acoustic information in emotional processing, especially laughter and prosody. It encompasses studies on auditory processing of emotional cues, acknowledging contextual and individual influences and proposing a network model in which emotional prosody is tied to several cortical and subcortical brain structures. In particular, an overview of the research on laughter impressively demonstrates the diversity of emotions expressed by this emotional vocalization, and the human competence for inferring those emotions as well as the differentiation in brain responses.