A Signal Detection Approach to the Perception of Affective Prosody in Anxious Individuals: A Developmental Study

The present study used a Signal Detection approach to the study of prosody perception in children and adults who self-reported high levels of anxiety. Seventy-one children aged eight and nine years, and 85 adults listened to filtered speech and were required to discriminate angry, fearful and happy tones of voice. Anxiety levels were not associated with perception of affective prosody in adults. Levels of anxiety were related to children's criterion but not sensitivity to prosody. Highly anxious children were significantly more liberal in reporting fearful prosody compared to low anxious children. Analyses of total responses suggest that this criterion is reflective of an interpretation bias as opposed to a response bias. Given that the interpretation bias was observed in children and not adults, it is possible that the bias may mark a vulnerability to develop further anxiety. This is consistent with previous experimental findings in other modalities as well as integrative models of anxiety development that identify such cognitive biases as predisposing factors. Furthermore, regardless of anxiety level, children were comparable to adults in their accuracy for fearful prosody, yet were significantly poorer than adults in their accuracy for angry and happy prosody. This suggests that fear may be one of the first emotions children learn to identify.