Lateralization of verbal and affective processes was investigated in P-dyslexic, L-dyslexic and normal children with the aid of a dichotic listening task. The children were asked to detect either the presence of a specific target word or of words spoken in a specific emotional tone of voice. The number of correct responses and reaction time were recorded. For monitoring words, an overall right ...

Functional imaging studies of healthy participants and previous lesion studies have provided evidence that empathy involves dissociable cognitive functions that rely on at least partially distinct neural networks that can be individually impaired by brain damage. These studies converge in support of the proposal that affective empathy--making inferences about how another person feels--engages a...

Many differences between the hemispheres have been observed, from the gross anatomical level to differences in dendritic structure or neurotransmitter distribution. Analytic reasoning and language functions such as grammar and vocabulary are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain. The right cerebral hemisphere plays a special role in tasks involving the direction of spatial atten...

During face-to-face communication, people continuously exchange para-linguistic information such as their emotional state through facial expressions, posture shifts, gaze patterns and prosody. These affective signals are subtle and complex. In this paper, we propose to explicitly model the interaction between the high level perceptual features using Latent-Dynamic Conditional Random Fields. Thi...

This paper provides a description of the structure and goals of the database of Russian Language Affective (emotional) utterances. It also reports some preliminary results of an experimental phonetic analysis of the acoustic characteristics of emotional utterances (surprise, happiness, anger, sadness and fear) vs. neutral ones in Russian. The study utilizes 600 database utterances by 10 speaker...

Affective prosody is that aspect of speech that conveys a speaker's emotional state through modulations in various vocal parameters, most prominently pitch. While a large body of research implicates the cingulate vocalization area in controlling affective vocalizations in monkeys, no systematic test of functional homology for this area has yet been reported in humans. In this study, we used fun...