Saying it with feeling: neural responses to emotional vocalizations

To determine how vocally expressed emotion is processed in the brain, we me asured neural activity in healthy volunteers listening to fearful, sad, hap py and neutral non-verbal vocalizations. Enhanced responses to emotional vo calizations were seen in the caudate nucleus, as well as anterior insular, temporal and prefrontal cortices. The right amygdala exhibited decreased re sponses to fearful vocalizations as well as fear-specific inhibitory intera ctions with left anterior insula. A region of the pens, implicated in acous tic startle responses also showed fear-specific interactions with the amygd ala. The data demonstrate: firstly, that processing of vocal emotion involv es a bilaterally distributed network of brain regions; and secondly, that p rocessing of fear-related auditory stimuli involves context-specific intera ctions between the amygdala and other cortical and brainstem regions implic ated in fear processing. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved .