The present study investigated the effects of brief synthesized spoken words with emotional content on the ratings of emotions and heart rate responses. Twenty participants' heart rate functioning was measured while they listened to a set of emotionally negative, neutral, and positive words produced by speech synthesizers. At the end of the experiment, ratings of emotional experiences were also collected. The results showed that the ratings of the words were in accordance with their valence. Heart rate deceleration was significantly the strongest and most prolonged to the negative stimuli. The findings are the first suggesting that brief spoken emotionally toned words evoke a similar heart rate response pattern found earlier for more sustained emotional stimuli. 1. Introduction Verbal communication is unique to humans, and speech is an especially effective means to communicate ideas and emotions to other people [1]. McGregor [2] argued that spoken language is a more primary and more fundamental means of communication than written language. In speech, both verbal meaning and prosodic cues within the speech can communicate emotions; however, there is little research on the role of the verbal meaning of spoken words to human emotions. Although studies concerning the emotional processing of the verbal content of speech are rare, the scope of emotion studies has recently broadened from studying the reactions to the pictures of emotional scenes and human faces to visually presented linguistic stimuli. In a way, emotionally charged spoken stimuli uttered in a monotone or a neutral tone of voice partly parallels written text. By this, it is meant that only lexical contents of the stimuli offer knowledge about emotion, so the results about visually presented written words can provide some background references for studying reactions to spoken emotional words. Studies using event related potential (ERP) measurements have repeatedly found that early cortical responses to visually presented words with emotional content are enhanced as compared to ERPs to neutral words. This suggests that the emotional content of a word is identified at an early lexical stage of processing (e.g., [3–5]). In addition, there is evidence that written emotionally negative words evoke larger activation of corrugator supercilii (i.e., frowning) facial muscle than positive words do [6–8]. There are also studies that have found larger startle reflex to unpleasant words than to neutral and positive words during shallow word processing [9, 10]. Further, there is some evidence that written
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