DOES EMOTION PERCEPTION IN MUSIC AND SPEECH PROSODY SHOW A NEGATIVE BIAS? A NEURAL OSCILLATION INVESTIGATION

Abstract

Previous research has shown that the emotional perception of language and the emotional perception of music show some neural relation. Studies focusing on emotional musical primes and the emotional interpretation of spoken words, visually presented words, and complex photos have found evidence of negative bias. Negative bias is the tendency to “attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information” (Vaish et al., 2008, p.383). In the present study, we utilized electroencephalogram oscillatory activity to determine the presence of negativity bias when assigning emotion to speech prosody after an emotional musical prime. We analyzed data from a study in which EEG oscillations and frontal asymmetry of participants were recorded while they were presented with pairs of emotional musical prime stimuli and target nonsense words spoken with either happy or sad intonation. These pairs were either matched or mismatched in emotional valence. Participants were asked to ignore the musical prime and judge only the emotional valence of the speaker’s voice in the target nonsense words. Mean EEG alpha band power, frontal alpha asymmetry, and individual alpha peak frequencies were measured. These measures were examined to determine attention devoted to negative stimuli and whether these attentional changes were indicative of negative bias. Results showed a significant decrease in mean alpha power when happy target words followed a sad musical prime, but no significant decrease when sad target words followed a happy musical prime. This provides evidence of negative bias in the processing of the emotion of music and language. Keywords: alpha oscillation, EEG, negative bias, emotion, music, language