,,Hearing emotions": The cerebral correlates of the processing of affective prosody

Besides a sequence of words, spoken utterances are characterized by prosodic (suprasegmental) qualities such as a distinct intonation contour (,,speech melody"), loudness variations, and a rhythmic structure. In addition to a variety of linguistic and pragmatic functions, these features may reflect a speaker's mood and, thus, contribute, concomitant with facial and gestural movements, to the nonverbal expression of emotions (affective prosody). Clinical studies yielded discrepant data on the cerebral correlates of the processing of affective prosody. Functional imaging provides a more recent approach to the analysis of brain-behaviour relationships. The available investigations indicate two successive stages of the perceptual encoding of affective prosody: (a) predominant right-hemisphere processing of intonation contours within posterior parts of the superior temporal gyrus, (b) evaluation of the conveyed emotion at the level of bilateral orbitofrontal cortex. These findings corroborate and extend the model of a more proficient analysis and short-term storage of tonal information within the right cerebral hemisphere.