Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Musicians outperform non-musicians in vocal emotion recognition, but the underlying mechanisms are still debated. Behavioral measures highlight the importance of acoustic sensitivity towards emotional voice cues. Compared with non-musicians, musicians are more sensitive to the pitch contour of vocal emotions. However, it remains unclear whether and how this group difference is reflected at the brain level. Thus, we compared event-related potentials (ERPs) to acoustically manipulated voices between musicians (n = 39) and non-musicians (n = 39). We used parameter-specific voice morphing to create and present vocal stimuli that conveyed happiness, fear, pleasure, or sadness, either in all acoustic cues, or selectively in either pitch contour or timbre. Although the P200 (150-250 ms) and N400 (300-500 ms) components were modulated by pitch and timbre, differences between musicians and non-musicians appeared only for a Late Positive Potential (500-1000ms). Overall, whereas this study did not reveal clear cut evidence that musicality affects early acoustic processing of vocal emotions, musical skills do seem to af-fect later more controlled aspects of emotional appraisal. In this OSF Repository, you find all supplemental material related to this work. Any use of data or code has to be referenced with the associated publication. If you have any questions, feel free to contact the authors (christine.nussbaum@uni-jena.de).