How do we understand the emotional undertone (prosody) of a conversation? It is known that humans typically combine linguistic and nonlinguistic information to comprehend emotions. But how important is the contribution of prosody in the identification of emotions? To find an answer to this question, scientists from Belgium, Germany, and Austria joined forces and investigated how different communication channels interact in the identification of emotions. In the first experiment they presented their subjects synonyms of “happy” and “sad” that were spoken with either happy and sad voice. Participants had more difficulty ignoring prosody than ignoring verbal content. Thus, prosody ran strong. In the second experiment, synonyms of “happy” and “sad” were spoken with happy and sad prosody, while happy or sad faces were displayed. As expected, accuracy was low in the incongruent condition. The power of prosody became evident when participants were required to focus on verbal content only with the facial information congruent with the verbal content. Even under this condition, a discrepancy with prosodic information strongly biased the identification of emotion. Thus, the impact of prosody is unexpectedly strong in the communication of emotion. Feelings during conversation are much more than words and faces.

Filippi, P., Ocklenburg, S., Bowling, D., Heege, L., Güntürkün, O., Newen, A., de Boer, B., More than words (and faces): Evidence for a Stroop effect of prosody in emotion word processing, Cognition and Emotion, 2016, May 3:1-13. [Epub ahead of print].