Researchers See Emotions People Hear
Posted on: Monday, 18 May 2009, 09:27 CDT
It sounds like science fiction, but it's really just science. A new study reveals doctors can "read" whether a person just heard words spoken with a particular emotion simply by observing the pattern of activity in the brain.Researchers presented people with words spoken in five different ways -- with anger, sadness, relief, joy or no emotion. The patients heard the words while their brains were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) . Scientists then analyzed the overall spatial pattern of activity in the auditory cortex by using a method called multivariate pattern analysis.
Their analysis showed that they could indeed classify each emotion against all others.
"Correct interpretation of emotion in the voice is highly important -- especially in a modern environment where visual emotional signals are often not available," Thomas Ethofer, from the University of Geneva, said in a press release. "We demonstrated that the spatial pattern of activity within the brain that processes human voices contains information about the expressed emotion."
Study authors say these findings could give new insight into better understanding social skills and various psychiatric disorders.
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