Emotional expressions provide strong signals in social interactions and can function as emotion inducers in a perceiver. Although speech provides one of the most important channels for human communication, its physiological correlates, such as activations of the autonomous nervous system (ANS) while listening to spoken utterances, have received far less attention than in other domains of emotio...

Affective Computing refers to computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions and has is natural application domain in highly abstracted humancomputer interactions. Affective computing can be divided into three main parts, namely display, recognition, and synthesis. The design of intelligent machines able to create natural interactions with the users necessarily impl...

Patients with right or left hemisphere strokes were studied for the nature of emotion conveyed in speech, during the reading of three short passages chosen for the differing emotional tone of their content. Both groups of patients had prosodic qualities which led their speech to be rated as like that of depressed patients and different from that of non-depressed controls. None of the stroke pat...

Conducting a study of emotional prosody often requires that one have a valid set of stimuli for assessing perceived emotion in vocal intonation. In this study, we created a list of sentences with both affective and neutral content, and then validated them against rater opinion. Participants read sentences with content that implied happiness, sadness, anger, fear, or neutrality and rated how wel...

Major depression is associated with impairments of executive functions and affect perception deficits, both being linked to dysfunction of fronto-subcortical networks. So far, little is known about the relationship between cognitive and affective deficits in major depression. In the present investigation, affect perception and executive functions were assessed in 29 patients with a diagnosis of...

This study investigated three aspects of processing materials with emotional content in patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD): the ability to produce affective prosody, to discriminate affectively loaded speech, and to detect the surprise element in humorous sketches. Study aims were the characterization of an emotional processing deficit, and to test whether impaired emotional proc...

Though prosody is studied since at least several decades, it is still unclear what kind of information about the speaker’s subjectivity and emotion is conveyed by prosody. This paper tries to focus on the role of prosody in marking speaker’s expressiveness in large Bàsàa spontaneous speech corpora. Following Caelen-Haumont & Bel 2000, this paper considers that prosodic organization is twofold: ...