Vasopressin and parental expressed emotion in the transition to fatherhood

In the last decades, parenting researchers increasingly focused on the role of fathers in child development. However, it is still largely unknown which factors contribute to fathers’ beliefs about their child, which may be crucial in the transition to fatherhood. In the current randomized within-subject experiment, the effect of nasal administration of vasopressin (AVP) on both Five Minute Speech Sample-based (FMSS) expressed emotion and emotional content or prosody was explored in 25 prospectivefathers. Moreover, we explored how the transition to fatherhood affected these FMSS-based parameters, using prenatal and early postnatal measurements. Analyses revealed that FMSS-based expressed emotion and emotional content were correlated, but not affected by prenatal AVP administration. However,child’s birth was associated with an increase in positivity and a decrease in emotional prosody, suggesting that the child’s birth is more influential with regard to paternal thoughts and feelings than prenatal AVP administration

Hearing Feelings: Affective Categorization of Music and Speech in Alexithymia, an ERP Study

Background: Alexithymia, a condition characterized by deficits in interpreting and regulating feelings, is a risk factor for a variety of psychiatric conditions. Little is known about how alexithymia influences the processing of emotions in music and speech. Appreciation of such emotional qualities in auditory material is fundamental to human experience and has profound consequences for functioning in daily life. We investigated the neural signature of such emotional processing in alexithymia by means of event-related potentials. Methodology: Affective music and speech prosody were presented as targets following affectively congruent or incongruent visual word primes in two conditions. In two further conditions, affective music and speech prosody served as primes and visually presented words with affective connotations were presented as targets. Thirty-two participants (16 male) judged the affective valence of the targets. We tested the influence of alexithymia on cross-modal affective priming and on N400 amplitudes, indicative of individual sensitivity to an affective mismatch between words, prosody, and music. Our results indicate that the affective priming effect for prosody targets tended to be reduced with increasing scores on alexithymia, while no behavioral differences were observed for music and word targets. At the electrophysiological level, alexithymia was associated with significantly smaller N400 amplitudes in response to affectively incongruent music and speech targets, but not to incongruent word targets. Conclusions: Our results suggest a reduced sensitivity for the emotional qualities of speech and music in alexithymia during affective categorization. This deficit becomes evident primarily in situations in which a verbalization of emotional information is required

Quality of Javanese and Sundanese Vowels

The vowel quality of Javanese and Sundanese is influenced by phonation types. The acoustic measurements of the differences in phonation between all Javanese and Sundanese vowels have not been instrumentally examined. Evidence suggests that F1 lowering is a common characteristic of vowel quality correlated with the phonation after the slack-voiced stop /b/. The current study seeks to extend the possible variation in the realization of phonation by Javanese vowels /i/, /e/, /a/, /ə/, /u/ and /o/ and Sundanese vowels /i/, /a/, /ə/, /ɨ/, /e/, /u/ and /o/ after the slack-voiced /b/ and the voiceless glottal /h/. In this experiment, the authors recorded the vowel production of four Javanese and four Sundanese native speakers and measured the formant frequencies (F1 and F2). The results confirm that Javanese and Sundanese vowels are constantly pronounced with lower F1 after /b/. In addition, the Javanese speakers articulate the vowel /ɘ/ rather than schwa /ə/ in the slack-voiced /b/ and voiceless glottal stop /h/, in which the vowel occupies the high-mid central position of the vowel space area. The Sundanese speakers in this study surprisingly produce the expected high vowel /ɨ/ in the high near-front of the vowel space; it is suggested to transcribe this as /ʏ/. The results of the formant frequencies of the Javanese and Sundanese vowels are consistent with the study by Hayward (1993) indicating F1 lowering after the slack-voiced /b/

Electrode Map.

<p>Map of electrode sites used for analysis with left and right anterior, central, and posterior regions identified.</p

Behavioral Affective Priming Effects.

<p>Behavioral affective priming effects during affective categorization of the targets. <i>MusicTarget</i>, <i>p</i><0.01, <i>ProsodyTarget</i>, <i>p</i><0.01, <i>MusicPrime</i>, <i>p</i> = 0.07, <i>ProsodyPrime</i>, <i>p</i><0.01. Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.</p