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  • syk inhibitors Our data also show an enhancement of the P co

    2018-11-03

    Our data also show an enhancement of the P300 component over central electrodes in response to laughing voices. This finding is consistent with previous ERP research using emotional speech showing a greater mid-latency positivity in response to happy speech when compared to angry speech (Grossmann et al., 2005, 2013), which has been taken to reflect a greater familiarity with happy (infant-directed) speech (see also Parise and Csibra, 2013). It is thus possible that the greater P300 to laughing peers is related to processes detecting the familiarity of positive affect expressed in voices. This is in line with the notion that, in typical development, positively-valenced vocal and facial stimuli are more commonly experienced by infants of this syk inhibitors age than negatively-valenced ones (see Vaish et al., 2008). Despite the overall similarity, there also exists a difference with respect to prior work using emotional speech. Specifically, the positivity (P300) observed in the current study occurred somewhat earlier (about 50ms) than in previous studies using emotional speech. This might be explained by the fact that in these prior studies infants needed to parse the speech information while (or in addition to) processing the emotional tone of voice, which may slow down the neural processes involved in emotion detection. The finding of an enhanced P300 in response to laughing peers in the current ERP study adds to the notion that infants’ brains are highly sensitive to happy voices and perceive them as familiar sounds. Furthermore, our ERP data showed an enhanced late positivity (slow wave) at central and parietal electrodes in response to both emotional vocalizations (crying and laughing sounds) when compared to the neutral control vocalizations (hummed speech). Positive slow waves in infant ERP have typically been associated with memory and learning processes, especially with the updating of an existing memory representation (see Grossmann et al., 2009; Nelson et al., 1998). This suggests that emotionally charged sounds might elicit the update of existing memory representations, whereas listening to neutral sounds engenders no such processes (see Grossmann et al., 2005). This underlines infants’ sensitivity to emotional information conveyed through the voice and points to a potential mechanism by which emotional vocalizations impact learning and memory. However, matter cycling interpretation of the late positivity is limited because differences between the neutral and the emotional sound conditions observed in the current study might alternatively be explained by infants’ neural capacity to distinguish between infant (both emotional conditions) and adult (neutral condition) sounds. Research is needed that directly compares between infant and adult vocalizations in order to clarify this issue. In summary, the current study is the first to investigate the neural correlates of infants’ processing of emotional peer vocalizations. These ERP results thus provide novel and valuable insights into the early development of emotion processing and represent a critical link to a host of prior behavioral studies focused on infants’ responses to other infants’ crying sounds. Our ERP results underscore infants’ neural sensitivity to emotional sounds produced by other infants and index the rapid neural detection of other infants’ vocal distress signals (crying). The ERP components (N200, P300, and late positivity) found to be sensitive to emotional vocalizations of peers in the current study may serve as valuable neural markers, which, in future studies, can be used to examine individual differences in emotion processing. Identifying such individual differences in infants’ emotion processing might also help predict empathic and helping behaviors in toddlerhood (see Davidov et al., 2013). All in all, the current findings provide further evidence for the notion that responding to others’ emotional vocal expressions is an essential and early developing social skill among humans, which includes the category of peer vocalizations.