Narratives are effective tools for evoking emotions, and physiological measurements provide a means of objectively assessing emotional reactions - making them a potentially powerful pair of tools for studying emotional processes. However, extent research combining emotional narratives and physiological measurement varies widely in design and application, making it challenging to identify previous work, consolidate findings, and design effective experiments. Our scoping review explores the use of auditory emotional narratives and physiological measures in research, examining paradigms, study populations, and represented emotions. Following the PRISMA-ScR Checklist, we searched five databases for peer-reviewed experimental studies that used spoken narratives to induce emotion and reported autonomic physiological measures. Among 3466 titles screened and 653 articles reviewed, 110 studies were included. Our exploration revealed a variety of applications and experimental paradigms; emotional narratives paired with physiological measures have been used to study diverse topics and populations, including neurotypical and clinical groups. Although incomparable designs and sometimes contradictory results precluded general recommendations as regards which physiological measures to use when designing new studies, as a whole, the body of work suggests that these tools can be valuable to study emotions. Our review offers an overview of research employing narratives and physiological measures for emotion study, and highlights weaknesses in reporting practices and gaps in our knowledge concerning the robustness and specificity of physiological measures as indices of emotion. We discuss study design considerations and transparent reporting, to facilitate future using emotional narratives and physiological measures in studying emotions.

Within certain categories of geometric shapes, prototypical exemplars that best characterize the category have been evidenced. These geometric prototypes are classically identified through the visual and haptic perception or motor production and are usually characterized by their spatial dimension. However, whether prototypes can be recalled through the auditory channel has not been formally investigated. Here we address this question by using auditory cues issued from timbre-modulated friction sounds evoking human drawing elliptic movements. Since non-spatial auditory cues were previously found useful for discriminating distinct geometric shapes such as circles or ellipses, it is hypothesized that sound dynamics alone can evoke shapes such as an exemplary ellipse. Four experiments were conducted and altogether revealed that a common elliptic prototype emerges from auditory, visual, and motor modalities. This finding supports the hypothesis of a common coding of geometric shapes according to biological rules with a prominent role of sensory-motor contingencies in the emergence of such prototypical geometry.

Problems with speech-in-noise (SiN) perception are extremely common in hearing loss. Clinical tests have generally been based on measurement of SiN. My group has developed an approach to SiN based on the auditory cognitive mechanisms that subserve this, that might be relevant to speakers of any language. I describe how well these predict SiN, the brain systems for them, and tests of auditory cognition based on them that might be used to characterise SiN deficits in the clinic.

Human auditory cognition spans everything from detecting a creaking door in the night to enjoying beautiful music. Neurofunctional models of these processes tend to focus on cortical networks, but how do subcortical circuits contribute to auditory cognition? Answering this question will lead to a richer understanding of how we process the complex auditory world.

The hippocampus has a well-established role in spatial and episodic memory but a broader function has been proposed including aspects of perception and relational processing. Neural bases of sound analysis have been described in the pathway to auditory cortex, but wider networks supporting auditory cognition are still being established. We review what is known about the role of the hippocampus in processing auditory information, and how the hippocampus itself is shaped by sound. In examining imaging, recording, and lesion studies in species from rodents to humans, we uncover a hierarchy of hippocampal responses to sound including during passive exposure, active listening, and the learning of associations between sounds and other stimuli. We describe how the hippocampus\' connectivity and computational architecture allow it to track and manipulate auditory information - whether in the form of speech, music, or environmental, emotional, or phantom sounds. Functional and structural correlates of auditory experience are also identified. The extent of auditory-hippocampal interactions is consistent with the view that the hippocampus makes broad contributions to perception and cognition, beyond spatial and episodic memory. More deeply understanding these interactions may unlock applications including entraining hippocampal rhythms to support cognition, and intervening in links between hearing loss and dementia.

Individuals with misophonia, a disorder involving extreme sound sensitivity, report significant anger, disgust, and anxiety in response to select but usually common sounds. While estimates of prevalence within certain populations such as college students have approached 20%, it is currently unknown what percentage of people experience misophonic responses to such \"trigger\" sounds. Furthermore, there is little understanding of the fundamental processes involved. In this study, we aimed to characterize the distribution of misophonic symptoms in a general population, as well as clarify whether the aversive emotional responses to trigger sounds are partly caused by acoustic salience of the sound itself, or by recognition of the sound. Using multi-talker babble as masking noise to decrease participants\' ability to identify sounds, we assessed how identification of common trigger sounds related to subjective emotional responses in 300 adults who participated in an online study. Participants were asked to listen to and identify neutral, unpleasant and trigger sounds embedded in different levels of the masking noise (signal-to-noise ratios: -30, -20, -10, 0, +10 dB), and then to evaluate their subjective judgment of the sounds (pleasantness) and emotional reactions to them (anxiety, anger, and disgust). Using participants\' scores on a scale quantifying misophonia sensitivity, we selected the top and bottom 20% scorers from the distribution to form a Most-Misophonic subgroup (N = 66) and Least-Misophonic subgroup (N = 68). Both groups were better at identifying triggers than unpleasant sounds, which themselves were identified better than neutral sounds. Both groups also recognized the aversiveness of the unpleasant and trigger sounds, yet for the Most-Misophonic group, there was a greater increase in subjective ratings of negative emotions once the sounds became identifiable, especially for trigger sounds. These results highlight the heightened salience of trigger sounds, but furthermore suggest that learning and higher-order evaluation of sounds play an important role in misophonia.

A consistent relationship has been found between rhythmic processing and reading skills. Impairment of the ability to entrain movements to an auditory rhythm in clinical populations with language-related deficits, such as children with developmental dyslexia, has been found in both behavioral and neural studies. In this study, we explored the relationship between rhythmic entrainment, behavioral synchronization, reading fluency, and reading comprehension in neurotypical English- and Mandarin-speaking adults. First, we examined entrainment stability by asking participants to coordinate taps with an auditory metronome in which unpredictable perturbations were introduced to disrupt entrainment. Next, we assessed behavioral synchronization by asking participants to coordinate taps with the syllables they produced while reading sentences as naturally as possible (tap to syllable task). Finally, we measured reading fluency and reading comprehension for native English and native Mandarin speakers. Stability of entrainment correlated strongly with tap to syllable task performance and with reading fluency, and both findings generalized across English and Mandarin speakers.

When more than one audible alarm is heard simultaneously, discrimination may be compromised. This experiment compares near-simultaneous clinical alarms in two styles, the first are the tonal \'melodies\' from the 2012/2006 version of a global medical device safety standard (IEC 60601-1-8) and the second are the auditory-icon-style recommended in the 2020 version of the same standard. Sixty-six participants were required to identify the meaning and priority of four different clinical alarms for one of the two styles of alarm (between-subjects). Alarms sounded both singly and in pairs (within-subjects). Results showed that the auditory icon alarms outperformed the tonal alarms on all measures except one, both for overall accuracy (recognizing both priority and function) and for partial accuracy (recognizing priority or function but not both). The results add to the growing body of evidence supporting the use of auditory icon alarms in clinical environments.

Everyday challenges impact our ability to hear and comprehend spoken language with ease, such as accented speech (source factors), spectral degradation (transmission factors), complex or unfamiliar language use (message factors), and predictability (context factors). Auditory degradation and linguistic complexity in the brain and behavior have been well investigated, and several computational models have emerged. The work here provides a novel test of the hypotheses that listening effort is partially reliant on higher cognitive auditory attention and working memory mechanisms in the frontal lobe, and partially reliant on hierarchical linguistic computation in the brain\'s left hemisphere. We specifically hypothesize that these models are robust and can be applied in ecologically relevant and coarse-grain contexts that rigorously control for acoustic and linguistic listening challenges. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy during an auditory plausibility judgment task, we show the hierarchical cortical organization for listening effort in the frontal and left temporal-parietal brain regions. In response to increasing levels of cognitive demand, we found (i) poorer comprehension, (ii) slower reaction times, (iii) increasing levels of perceived mental effort, (iv) increasing levels of brain activity in the prefrontal cortex, (v) hierarchical modulation of core language processing regions that reflect increasingly higher-order auditory-linguistic processing, and (vi) a correlation between participants\' mental effort ratings and their performance on the task. Our results demonstrate that listening effort is partly reliant on higher cognitive auditory attention and working memory mechanisms in the frontal lobe and partly reliant on hierarchical linguistic computation in the brain\'s left hemisphere. Further, listening effort is driven by a voluntary, motivation-based attention system for which our results validate the use of a single-item post-task questionnaire for measuring perceived levels of mental effort and predicting listening performance. We anticipate our study to be a starting point for more sophisticated models of listening effort and even cognitive neuroplasticity in hearing aid and cochlear implant users.

OBJECTIVE: The present study explored the auditory benefits of abacus-training using a battery of tests (auditory acuity, clarity, and cognition). The study also aimed to identify the relative contributions of auditory processing tests that are most sensitive to the effects of abacus-training.
METHODS: The study was conducted on 60 children aged between 9 - 14 years. These participants were divided into two groups (abacus trained and untrained) of 30 each, who underwent a series of auditory functioning tests. The battery of tests included: auditory acuity (frequency, intensity, temporal, binaural and spatial resolution), auditory clarity (speech perception in noise), and auditory cognition (working digit and syllable memory).
RESULTS: Statistically (t-test and Mann Whitney U test), significant changes were observed in the spatial resolution, auditory clarity, and cognition tests, suggestive of positive outcomes of abacus training at the higher-order auditory processing. This finding was complemented by the discriminant function (DF) analyses, which showed that clarity and cognitive measures helped for effective group segregation (abacustrained and untrained). These measures had significantly higher contributions to the DF.
CONCLUSIONS: The findings of the study provide evidence of the multi-component benefits of abacus training in children and the transferability of learning effects to the auditory modality.