The neural basis of emotional prosody perception: An effect size meta-analysis of the functional neuroimaging literature.

Recent work has suggested that emotional prosody is processed in a ventral and a dorsal processing stream similarly to segmental speech perception. Furthermore, it has been proposed that there is right hemispheric lateralization of emotional prosody perception and that task demands and sex modulate activity within the emotional prosody perception network. In the present study, a novel powerful effect size meta-analysis was performed on the neuroimaging literature of stimulus-driven emotional prosody perception. The results show that a much larger network of areas is activated than previously assumed. Furthermore, all areas assumed to be involved in the ventral and dorsal stream are indeed robustly activated across the literature, except for the dorsal premotor area. Additionally, explicit processing of emotional prosody activated additional areas beyond the core network and seems to engage dorsal stream areas more than implicit processing. No lateralized activation of emotional prosody is observed, suggesting that emotional prosody perception is a highly bilateral process. Last, the proportion of females in primary studies was associated with very subtle enhanced neural processing in neural regions assumed to be involved in both early and late stages of emotional prosody perception. The meta-analytic effect size maps obtained can be used for sample size calculations of future neuroimaging studies of emotional prosody perception.