ISCA Archive Interspeech 2014
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2014

When voices get emotional: a study of emotion-enhanced memory and impairment during emotional prosody exposure

Cyrielle Chappuis, Didier Grandjean

Emotional expressions influence memory by both impairing and enhancing attention and perception at encoding, consolidation and recall. In three studies we compare angry, happy and fearful emotional prosodies using a single-word presentation paradigm, and investigate the effects of emotional vocal expressions on immediate and delayed recall for central emotional items and their periphery. Overall the results support a prosody-induced emotional enhancement of memory, as well as a memory facilitation for the periphery of specific emotions. The fact that emotional enhancement of memory by prosody was replicated in three studies suggests a robust effect, which to our best knowledge has not been observed before with vocal expressions.