Prefaces (“I’m calling about your medical examination”) to news announcements ("They’re better than previously”) can serve important interactional functions such as preparing listeners for the emotional content of the upcoming news. We address whether, in French, listeners associate the valence of the upcoming news with a matching affective reaction depending on the prosody conveyed solely in the preface. For this, we used prefaces extracted from recordings of read voicemail-like announcements, presented in isolation (i.e., without the news). Prefaces varied in the emotional valence of the upcoming news: positive, negative, neutral. 110 participants (66 women, 42 men, 2 non-binary) were assigned to three experimental groups which varied in the pairing of two of three possible valences. They were instructed to choose among two-alternative forced-choices depending on their affective reaction. Results showed that only positive and neutral news elicited matching responses, and solely when they were contrasted with negative news. Additionally, women chose matching responses more often than men when positive and negative news were paired. No effects were found on reaction times. These findings suggests that prosodic variation within the preface leads listeners to associate the emotional valence of upcoming news with matching affective reaction.