Is infant neural sensitivity to vocal emotion associated with mother-infant relational experience?

ABSTRACT: An early understanding of others' vocal emotions provides infants with a distinct advantage for eliciting appropriate care from caregivers and for navigating their social world. Consistent with this notion, an emerging literature suggests that a temporal cortical response to the prosody of emotional speech is observable in the first year of life. Furthermore, neural specialisation to vocal emotion in infancy may vary according to early experience. Neural sensitivity to emotional non-speech vocalisations was investigated in 29 six-month-old infants using near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Both angry and happy vocalisations evoked increased activation in the temporal cortices (relative to neutral and angry vocalisations respectively), and the strength of the angry minus neutral effect was p

SUBMITTER: Zhao C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6392422 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature