It’s how you said it and what I heard: a comparison of motivational and emotional tone of voice

Previous research has viewed motivational and emotional vocal expressions as the same (e.g., Meyer & Turner, 2006; Fontaine & Scherer, 2013), but until now no direct comparison of these types of prosody has been available. Building on the new motivational prosody literature (e.g., Weinstein, Zougkou & Paulmann, 2014; 2018), this series of studies was the first to explore the differences and similarities between these forms of prosody. Initially, contextually valid sentences were intoned in angry, joyful, supportive, and controlling tones of voice by trained speakers, which were then acoustically analysed. Results revealed that each state was intoned with a different acoustic profile. Subsequently, exemplars were validated in a forced choice categorisation study and acoustics were extracted again. Results confirmed that each state was communicated with a different configuration of vocal cues, thus indicating that emotional and motivational states do not share the same prosodic profiles. In a final study, using an event-related potential (ERP) approach the time-course processing of these constructs was investigated. Findings suggest that emotional and motivational prosody share similar processing time-courses and neural resources. Weak evidence indicated possibly deviations in processing but were not strong enough to draw any conclusions. Taken together, the results of this investigation suggest that emotional and motivational prosody are likely distinct constructs. We conclude that these constructs differ on an encoding level and different vocal cues potentially lead to their effective recognition, but they are similar with respect to how they are processed in the brain. Implications, limitations and directions for future research are discussed.