Cortical activities associated with emotional prosody processing: a MEG study

The cortical areas involved in processing of emotional prosody (EP), such as joy or sadness, have been reported to be localized in the right basal ganglia, frontal lobes or bilateral temporal lobes in recent fMRI studies. Moreover, event-related brain potentials have not been shown to have ERP components with latencies associated with EP recognition, namely N1, P2 and P3. So, we investigated a processing of EP using magnetoencephalography (MEG), which has a high time and space resolution. In the test session, an emotional voice (expressing joy, sadness or normal mood, and calling a name consisting of 5 moras) was presented, followed by a 900 ms interstimulus interval and then an emotional face (the same emotion as the voice) was displayed for 1000 ms. The subjects were requested to judge whether or not the emotional features of the voice and face were identical. In the control session, the emotional voices were presented while the subjects carried out visual working memory (n-back) tasks between two sessions, and significant differences in the cortical activities associated with processing of EP were observed during the latencies in different periods after the onset of stimuli in both hemispheres.