The Effect Of Emotional Prosody On Self-related Voice Processing

In social interaction,humans will give priority to processing selfrelated information(such as self-face,self-name etc.),which is called selfprioritization effect.According to an implicit positive association theory,self-face recognition and the concomitant self-awareness activate positive attribute in self-concept,which facilitates behavioral responses to self-face and thus results in self-advantage in face recognition.In recent years,more and more studies have begun to focus on the interaction between selfrelevance and emotional valence during information processing.For example,researchers have found that the processing of self-expression is influenced by valence and positive self-expression evoked greater response than other expressions.Most of these studies revealed the interaction between self-processing and emotion-processing under the visual channel.In fact,individuals have to distinguish between self-related emotional sounds and other-related emotional sounds in the course of social conversations.Therefore,exploring the interaction between self-relevance and emotional valence during auditory processing can help us better understand human social behavior.In the present research,we conducted two studies to explore the processing of self vs.non-self emotional vocalization from the behavioral level and the neural level.In study 1,we adopted the novel associative learning paradigm and designed three behavioral experiments to test whether the emotional prosody would influence the self-prioritization effects in voice processing.Firstly,participants were required to learn the association between identity tag("self","friend" and "stranger")and emotional utterances(happiness,neutrality and anger).The first experiment required participants to complete the label-voice matching task.It was found a reliable selfprioritization on benefit on response times and perceptual sensitivity,but independent of emotion contexts.The second experiment required participants to explicitly classify voice stimuli according to self-relevance.Similarly,in the third experiment,participants were required to implicitly classify voice stimuli according to familiarity.These two experiments consistently found the advantage of self-processing were independent of emotion context.These results expanded the application of perceptual matching paradigm,demonstrating self-relevance facilitates auditory processing but independent of emotion valence.In the second study,we selected self-generated voice as self-related clues and used event-related potential techniques(ERPs)to investigate how emotional prosody influence the time course of self-voice processing.The behavioral results showed that participants responded to self-generated voices faster than other-generated voices,reflecting self-prioritization effects.ERP results showed that in the early sensory processing stage,emotional stimuli could be differentiated from neutral stimuli as early as100 ms after utterances onset(N1),suggesting rapid emotional decoding.In the P2 time window,emotional prosody affected the recognition of self vs.other voices.The specific manifestation is that happy self-voice evoked greater P2 amplitudes,indicating that positive valence enhanced selfprocessing.In the N400 stage,self-voice evoked more negative wave than other-voices only in the angry condition.This result further proved individuals were sensitive to negative self-voice during N400 stage.In addition,self-voice induced greater LPP amplitudes than other-voice,and emotional voice induced greater LPP amplitudes than neutral one.The results indicated the processing of self-voice,like other self-related stimuli,was different from the processing of other-voice,and neural mechanism of self-processing was similar with emotion-processing.In summary,no matter whether novel self-associated voice or familiar self-voice used as self-related cues,there were reliable self-prioritization effects.Moreover,the modulation of emotion valence on self-processing is reflected in the P2 and N400 components.