The effects of vocal emotions and emotional context on the neural tracking of speech envelopes and listeners’ vigilance states
Teagan Esme Esther, Liron Shlesinger, Fernando Llanos · 2026
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Description
Teagan Esme Esther, Liron Shlesinger, and Fernando Llanos studied how the emotion in a voice changes the way the brain tracks speech, in a 2026 study. Loud, high-arousal speech such as angry or happy talk reshapes the signal's amplitude over time. The team asked how those changes, and the emotional context before each sentence, affect both speech tracking and listener alertness.
Thirty native English speakers listened to angry, happy, and neutral sentences while their brain waves were recorded. Sentences came either grouped by emotion or in random order. Angry speech drove a stronger alertness signal than the other types, but only when sentences were grouped. Plain speech, though, was tracked more faithfully than emotional speech.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Teagan Esme Esther, Liron Shlesinger, Fernando Llanos |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 57 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |