Sonic Empathy: The Role of Vocal Tone In Transcultural Psychiatry

This academic article, written at Colorado State University in the fall of 2013 for an Ethnopsychiatry course, reveals how vocal tone - "prosody" - is affected by acculturation to particular musical scales, and how a lack of exposure to or affinity for foreign music can crucially affect intercultural interaction and even psychiatric health of immigrants and international students. It concludes with suggestions for psychiatric practitioners, regarding treatment of multinational or multilingual people, that they perform host-country prosody recognition tests (using the dominant regional language) before diagnosing patients with Adjustment Disorder, let alone Major Depression or Anxiety Disorder.