Cerebral hemodynamics during discrimination of prosodic and semantic emotion in speech studied by transcranial Doppler ultrasonography

Simultaneous measurement of blood flow velocity (BFV) in the middle cerebral arteries was achieved by transcranial Doppler ultrasonography in 36 right-handed volunteers who were instructed to identify the emotion conveyed by prosody or semantics of a number of sentences. The tasks were performed under 2 levels of interference: neutral versus discordant affective value of the modality that had to be ignored. A multivariate analysis of variance showed a significant bilateral increase in BFV during the discordant conditions reflecting increased attentional demand. A significant left-hemispheric lateralization of BFV was observed as emotional semantics were labeled. When attention was shifted to affective prosody, the lateralization effect disappeared as a result of a marked increase in right-hemispheric BFV.