Brain mechanisms for processing perceived emotional vocalizations in humans

Humans express emotional information in their facial expressions and body movements, as well as in their voice. In this chapter we consider the neural processing of a specific kind of vocal expressions, non-verbal emotional vocalizations e.g., laughs and sobs. We outline evidence, from patient studies and functional imaging studies, for both emotion-specific and more general processing of emotional information in the voice. We relate these findings to evidence for both basic and dimensional accounts of the representations of emotion. We describe in detail an fMRI study of positive and negative non-verbal expressions of emotion, which revealed that prefrontal areas involved in the control of orofacial movements were also sensitive to different kinds of vocal emotional information.