BIOGRAPHY

I studied English Linguistics, American Literature and Media at the Universities of Paderborn, Germany, and Groningen, The Netherlands. In 2003, I completed a Masters degree at the University of Paderborn. For the next three years I worked on my Ph.D. thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. I obtained a Ph.D. in Cognitive Sciences from the University of Potsdam in 2006 (thesis title: "Electrophysiological Evidence on the Processing of Emotional Prosody: Insights from Healthy and Patient Populations". Next, I held a position at the MPI in Leipzig as a postdoctoral research fellow and in 2007 received a postdoctoral fellowship award by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in order to join the Neuropragmatics and Emotion Lab at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. I became a lecturer in the Psychology Department at the University of Essex in September 2009.

RESEARCH OVERVIEW

I am interested in emotion and language processing in normal and special populations (bilinguals, brain damaged). First and foremost, I would like to understand how our brain manages to successfully process language within milliseconds! To investigate this fascinating capability, my research employs event-related brain potentials (ERPs), but I also use behavioral methodologies and eye tracking to understand how language processing in emotional and bilingual contexts works. For the last years I have been working on projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Centre for Research on Language, Mind and Brain (CRLMB) that deal with the perception of emotional speech in healthy (young and middle-aged) and patient populations (OFC- and BG-lesion patients, PD patients). Previous research I have conducted also looked at second language processing; in particular, I was interested in language control aspects, that is, if and how our proficiency level and our first language have an impact on how we process our second language.
It is indisputable that emotional language comprehension is crucial in daily-life social interactions and, fortunately, researchers are also slowly realizing that speaking more than one language is the rule rather than the exception. In future research I hope to further combine these two important research lines as I think that understanding how emotions are expressed and processed in bilinguals can shed further light on the relationship between emotion and language in more general terms.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Paulmann, S.* & Uskul, A.* (in press). Cross-cultural emotional prosody recognition: Evidence from Chinese and British listeners. Cognition and Emotion.

* contributed equally

Paulmann, S., Bleichner, M., Kotz, S.A. (2013). Valence, arousal, and task effects in emotional prosody processing. Frontiers in Psychology, 4:345. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00345

Budd, M.J., Paulmann, S., Barry, C., Clahsen, H. (in press). Brain potentials during language production in children and adults: and ERP study of the English past tense. Brain and Language.

Garrido-Vásquez, P., Pell, M.D., Paulmann, S., Strecker, K., Schwarz, J., Kotz, S.A. (in press). An ERP study of vocal emotion processing in asymmetric Parkinson’s disease. Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience.

Kotz, S. A., Hasting, A., & Paulmann, S. (2013). On the orbito-striatal interface in (acoustic) emotional processing. In E. Altenmüller, S. Schmidt, & E. Zimmermann (Eds.), Evolution of emotional communication: From sounds in non-human mammals to speech and music in man (pp. 229-240). New York: Oxford University Press.

Paulmann, S., Jessen, S., Kotz, S.A. (2012). It's special the way you say it: An ERP investigation on the temporal dynamics of two types of prosody. Neuropsychologia, 50, 1609–1620.

Paulmann, S., Titone, D., Pell, M.D. (2012). How emotional prosody guides your way: evidence from eye movements. Speech Communication, 54, 92-107.

Paulmann, S. & Pell, M.D. (2011). Is there an advantage for recognizing multi-modal emotional stimuli? Motivation and Emotion, 35 (2), 192-201.

Paulmann, S., Ott, D.V.M., Kotz, S.A. (2011). Emotional Speech Perception Unfolding in Time: The Role of the Basal Ganglia. PLoS ONE, 6 (3), e17694.

Kotz, S.A. & Paulmann, S. (2011). Emotion, Language and the Brain. Language and Linguistics Compass, 5 (3), 108 -125.

Paulmann, S. & Pell, M.D. (2010). Dynamic emotion processing in Parkinson’s disease as a function of channel availability. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 32, 822-835.

Paulmann, S. & Pell, M.D. (2010). Contextual influences of emotional speech prosody on face processing: how much is enough? Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience. 10, 230-242.

Paulmann, S., Seifert, S., Kotz, S.A. (2010). Orbito-frontal lesions cause impairment in late but not early emotional prosodic processing stages. Social Neuroscience, 5, 59 - 75.

Paulmann, S. & Pell, M.D. (2009). Decoding emotional faces depends on their representational value: ERP evidence. NeuroReport, 20, 1603-1608.

Paulmann, S., Pell, M.D., & Kotz, S.A. (2009). Comparative processing of emotional prosody and semantics following basal ganglia infarcts: ERP evidence of selective impairments for disgust and fear. Brain Research, 1295, 159-169.

Pell, M.D., Paulmann, S., Dara, C., Alasseri, A., & Kotz, S.A. (2009). Factors in the recognition of vocally expressed emotions: a comparison of four languages. Journal of Phonetics, 37, 417-435.

Paulmann, S., Jessen, S., Kotz, S.A. (2009). Investigating the multi-modal nature of human communication: Insights from ERPs. Journal of Psychophysiology, 23, 63 - 76.

Pell, M.D., Monetta, L., Paulmann, S. & Kotz, S.A. (2009). Recognizing emotions in a foreign language. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 33, 107-120.

Paulmann, S., Pell, M.D., & Kotz, S.A. (2008). Functional contributions of the basal ganglia to emotional prosody: evidence from ERPs. Brain Research, 1217, 171-178.

Paulmann, S., Pell, M.D. & Kotz, S.A. (2008). How aging affects the recognition of emotional speech. Brain and Language, 104, 262-269.

Paulmann, S. & Kotz, S.A. (2008). Early emotional prosody perception based on different speaker voices. NeuroReport, 19(2), 209-213.

Paulmann, S. & Kotz, S.A. (2008). An ERP investigation on the temporal dynamics of emotional prosody and emotional semantics in pseudo- and lexical sentence context. Brain and Language, 105(1), 59-69.

Kotz, S.A., & Paulmann, S. (2007). When emotional prosody and semantics dance cheek to cheek: ERP evidence. Brain Research,1151, 107-118.

Kotz, S.A., Meyer, M., & Paulmann, S. (2006). Lateralization of emotional prosody in the brain: an overview and synopsis on the impact of study design. In: Anders, Ende, Junghöfer, Kissler and Wildgruber (Eds.), Progress in Brain Research, Vol. 156. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 285-294 (Chapter 15).

Paulmann, S. (2006). Electrophysiological Evidence on the Processing of Emotional Prosody: Insights from Healthy and Patient Populations. In Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Ed.), MPI series in Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, vol. 71, Leipzig.

Paulmann, S., Elston-Güttler, K.E., Gunter, T.C., & Kotz, S.A. (2006). Is bilingual lexical access influenced by language context? NeuroReport, 17(7), 727-731.

Elston-Güttler, K.E., Paulmann, S., & Kotz, S.A. (2005). The role of proficiency on activation of L1 lexical representations during L2 processing: An ERP study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17, 1593-1610.