Abstract
One-hundred-fifteen participants (73 female, 42 male) were evaluated for prosody, or vocal emotion, perception, personality factors, relational aggression and physical aggression. The male participants reported higher levels of physical aggression, and the female participants reported greater Neuroticism, consistent with other data. For the male participants, better perception of prosody was related to both greater Extraversion and greater Conscientiousness, all involved in interpersonal functioning. These relationships were not found in the female participants, but there was a relationship between perception of prosody and relational aggression. Women who were better at perceiving the emotional status of others based on vocal cues were less relationally aggressive. Perhaps greater relational aggression reflects a poor adaptation to diminished ability to perceive emotional status.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Archer, J., & Coyne, S. (2005). An integrated review of indirect, relational, and social aggression. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9(3), 212–230.
Bar-On, R. (1997). Bar-on emotional quotient inventory. Toronto: Multi-Health Systems.
Burton, L., & Levy, J. (1989). Sex differences in the lateralized processing of facial emotion. Brain and Cognition, 11, 210–228.
Burton, L., Rabin, L., Wyatt, G., Frohlich, J., Vardy, S., & Dimitri, D. (2005). Priming effects for affective vs. neutral faces. Brain and Cognition, 59(3), 322–329.
Burton, L., Hafetz, J., & Henninger, D. (2007). Gender differences in Relational and Physical Aggression. Social Behavior and Personality, 35(1), 41–50.
Buss, D., & Perry, M. (1992). The aggression questionnaire. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(3), 452–459.
Collignon, O., Girard, S., Gosselin, F., Saint-Amour, D., Lepore, F., & Lassonde, M. (2009). Women process multisensory emotion expressions more efficiently than men. Neuropsychologia, 48, 220–225.
Costa, P., & McCrae, R. (1992). NEO PI-R. Lutz: Psychological Assessment Resources.
Crick, N., & Grotpeter, J. (1995). Relational aggression, gender, and social-psychological adjustment. Child Development, 66, 710–722.
Everhart, E., Demaree, H., & Shipley, A. (2006). Perception of emotional prosody: moving toward a model that incorporates sex-related differences. Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, 5(2), 92–102.
Hall, J. (1978). Gender effects in decoding nonverbal cues. Psychological Bulletin, 85, 845–857.
Hampson, E., van Anders, S., & Muyllen, L. (2006). A female advantage in the recognition of emotional facial expressions: test of an evolutionary hypothesis. Evolution and Human Behavior, 27, 401–416.
McClure, E. (2000). A meta-analytic review of sex differences in facial expression processing and their development in infants, children, and adolescents. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 424–453.
Mitchell, J. (1995). Nonverbal processing ability and social competence in preschool children. Unpublished honors thesis, Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.
Mitchell, R., & Ross, E. (2008). fMRI evidence for the effect of verbal complexity on lateralization of the neural response associated with decoding prosodic emotion. Neuropsychologia, 46, 2880–2887.
Mitchell, R., Elliot, R., Barry, M., Cruttenden, A., & Woodruff, P. (2003). The neural response to emotional prosody, as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Neuropsychologia, 41, 1410–1421.
Nowicki, S. (2003) A maual for the receptive tests of the DANVA2. Unpublished manual, Psychology Department, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.
Nowicki, S., & Duke, M. (1994). Individual differences in the nonverbal communication of affect: the diagnostic analysis of nonverbal accuracy scale. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 18, 9–35.
Roberts, V., McClure, E., & Nowicki, S. (1998). Emotional prosody recognition and right hemisphere functioning in the elderly. Paper presented at the INS meeting, Honolulu, Hawaii.
Ross, E., & Monnot, M. (2008). Neurology of affective prosody and its functional-anatomic organization in the right hemisphere. Brain and Language, 104, 51–74.
Verbeek, P. (1996). Peacemaking in young children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.
Werner, N., & Crick, N. (1999). Relational aggression and social-psychological adjustment in a college sample. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 108(4), 615–623.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Burton, L., Bensimon, E., Allimant, J.M. et al. Relationship of Prosody Perception to Personality and Aggression. Curr Psychol 32, 275–280 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-013-9181-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-013-9181-6