Vocal Emotion Perception and Musicality—Insights from EEG Decoding

Musicians have an advantage in recognizing vocal emotions compared to non-musicians, a performance advantage often attributed to enhanced early auditory sensitivity to pitch. Yet a previous ERP study only detected group differences from 500 ms onward, suggesting that conventional ERP analyses might not be sensitive enough to detect early neural effects. To address this, we re-analyzed EEG data from 38 musicians and 39 non-musicians engaged in a vocal emotion perception task. Stimuli were generated using parameter-specific voice morphing to preserve emotional cues in either the pitch contour (F0) or timbre. By employing a neural decoding framework with a Linear Discriminant Analysis classifier, we tracked the evolution of emotion representations over time in the EEG signal. Converging with the previous ERP study, our findings reveal that musicians-but not non-musicians-exhibited significant emotion decoding between 500 and 900 ms after stimulus onset, a pattern observed for F0-Morphs only. These results suggest that musicians' superior vocal emotion recognition arises from more effective integration of pitch information during later processing stages rather than from enhanced early sensory encoding. Our study also demonstrates the potential of neural decoding approaches using EEG brain activity as a biological sensor for unraveling the temporal dynamics of voice perception.