Over the past 150 years, linguistic processes have been extensively studied, leading to insights into the brain areas involved in speech production and perception, specializations for different linguistic levels, and how these processes interact in real time. Despite this growing body of knowledge, surprisingly little is known about how different states of arousal affect language processing.
This presentation focuses on two experiments examining the effects of long-term and acute stress on emotion recognition in speech, including the role of social support in the acute stress condition. Our findings reveal that women generally outperform men in recognizing vocal emotions. Under moderate prolonged stress, men’s ability to detect sadness declined, while women remained unaffected. In acute stress, gender differences disappeared, but stress without social support heightened the detection of negative emotions—a pattern not seen when social support was present.
These results underscore the complex effects of prolonged and acute stress on emotional voice recognition, with key roles for gender and emotional valence.