19th "ThinkHeart" Lecture with Ana P. Pinheiro, Ph.D.
Yesterday, on September 01, 2026, we had our 19th GRK 2824 ThinkHeart” Lecture where Ana P. Pinheiro, Ph.D., Associate Professor with Habilitation, Director of the Voice, Emotion & Speech Laboratory, Faculty of Psychology, University of Lisbon gave a lecture entitled
„Emotional voice perception at millisecond speed“
Please find here a brief summary about her talk:
The human voice is possibly the most important sound category in the social landscape. Compared to other non-verbal emotion signals, the voice is particularly effective in communicating emotions: it can carry information over large distances and independent of sight. However, the study of vocal emotion expression and perception is surprisingly far less developed than the study of emotion in faces. Thereby, its neural and functional correlates remain elusive.
In this talk, the dynamic neurocognitive operations that take place when we listen to vocal emotions will be specified, with a focus on the effects of stimulus type, task demands, and speaker and listener characteristics (e.g., age). These studies suggest that emotional voice perception is not only a matter of how one speaks but also of who speaks and who listens. Implications of these findings for the understanding of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia will be discussed.
It was very interesting to listen about “How does the brain transform a rappidly unfolding acoustic signal into an emotional percept”.
Additionally it was very fascinating to listen to Prof. Pinheiro. Her enthusiasm for her research was very impressive.
Many thanks to Prof. Pinheiro for visiting us in Göttingen - It was a great pleasure to have you here!
Also many thanks to our PhD student of the 2nd cohort André Mendes Costa/RP11 for chairing the lecture - Well done!