The present study investigated the processing of emotional speech in men and women. The stimulus material consisted of words with positive, neutral or negative meaning that were spoken with either congruent or incongruent emotional prosody. In one task, participants judged the emotional prosody while ignoring the word meaning, in another task participants judged the emotional word meaning while ignoring the prosody. The event related potentials (ERPs) revealed an interaction of emotional prosody and word meaning only in female participants. Incongruent trials elicited an enhanced N400 amplitude as compared to congruent trials. Male participants failed to show an interaction. Rather, ERPs revealed independent effects for word meaning and emotional prosody, suggesting that men process both types of emotional information independently.
Cite as: Schirmer, A., Kotz, S.A. (2002) Sex differentiates the STROOP-effect in emotional speech: ERP evidence. Proc. Speech Prosody 2002, 631-634
@inproceedings{schirmer02_speechprosody,
author={Annett Schirmer and Sonja A. Kotz},
title={{Sex differentiates the STROOP-effect in emotional speech: ERP evidence}},
year=2002,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2002},
pages={631--634}
}