Domestic Violence Research

The brain can't ignore angry voices (source: Nature Neuroscience)

We're highly tuned to emotional signals. So whereas most of the information bombarding our brain is filtered, emotion-related signals seem to strike home regardless. Take fearful faces - research has shown these trigger the same activity in a fear-sensitive brain region, the amygdala, regardless of whether we're paying attention to them. This is in contrast to how the brain normally works. For example, a face will trigger a different amount of activity in the brain's fusiform gyri - a kind of face-processing module - depending on whether that face is being attended to. Didier Grandjean and colleagues at the University of Geneva wanted to find out whether the brain treats emotional sounds with the same priority as emotional sights.

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Grandjean, D., Sander, D., Pourtois, G., Schwartz, S., Seghier, M.L., Scherer, K.R. & Vuilleumier, P. (2005). The voices of wrath: brain responses to angry prosody in meaningless speech. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 145-146.

Journal weblink: http://www.nature.com/neuro