ISCA Archive Interspeech 2015
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2015

Lateralization in emotional speech perception following transcranial direct current stimulation

Alex Francois-Nienaber, Jed A. Meltzer, Frank Rudzicz

The degree to which the perception of spoken emotion is lateralized in the brain remains a controversial topic. This work examines hemispheric differences in the perception of emotion in speech by applying tDCS, a neurostimulation protocol, to the T-RES speech emotion rating paradigm. We find several significant effects, including a strong interaction of prosody and neurostimulation for perceptual ratings when considering only lexical content, and that the perception of happiness does not appear to be affected by tDCS, but anger and (to a large extent) fear appear less intense after stimulation.