Consider the last presentation you heard at a conference. Was the speaker's speech emotionally charged? Or was it neutral? Do you remember the content? 

The reason I'm asking you these questions is because according to Annett Schirmer and colleagues from the National University of Singapore, emotion helps us recognize words quicker and more accurately straight away. In the longer term, however, we do not remember emotionally intoned speech as accurately as neutral speech. When we do remember the words, they have acquired an emotional value; for example words spoken in a sad voice are remembered as more negative than words spoken in a neutral voice.

In anger, sadness, exhilaration or fear, speech takes on an urgency that is lacking from its normal even-tempered form. It becomes louder or softer, more hurried or delayed, more melodic, erratic or monotonous. And this emotional speech immediately captures a listener's attention. Schirmer and colleagues' work looks at whether emotion has a lasting effect on word memory.

A total of 48 men and 48 women listened to sadly and neutrally spoken words and were later shown these words in a visual test, examining word recognition and attitudes to these words. The authors also measured brain activity to look for evidence of vocal emotional coding.

Their analyses showed that participants recognized words better when they had previously heard them in the neutral tone compared with the sad tone. In addition, words were remembered more negatively if they had previously been heard in a sad voice.

The researchers also looked at gender differences in word processing. They found that women were more sensitive to the emotional elements than men, and were more likely than men to recall the emotion of the speaker's voice. Current levels of the female sex hormone estrogen predicted these differences.

"Emotional voices produce changes in long-term memory, as well as capturing the listener's attention," Schirmer said. "They influence how easily spoken words are later recognized and what emotions are assigned to them. Thus voices, like other emotional signals, affect listeners beyond the immediate present."

The study, looking at the role of emotion in word recognition memory, is published online in Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience.

If you're a speaker, do you strive to present as neutrally as possible? Would you prefer people to remember you for your emotionally charged speech or your content? How can you achieve both? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments. 

Most people who don't like what a presenter is saying walk out of the session. Some may be vocal and boo or hiss (do people still hiss?). Or maybe if the session is great, people will clap or say woot-woot. 

Those are time-honored traditions. However, for those seeking something more up-to-date, check out LVnH8, a flashcard system for your portable devices. Just pick one of the 300 cards and flash your message to whomever you'd like in the room.  

Flashcard sender beware: We make no promises about how the receiver of your message will react.  

Okay, maybe not every presentation. But a lot of them. More than we would like to admit. It's funny because it's true. 

In this O'Reilly Radar article, Jenn Webb with USA Today interviews LiquidText founder and CEO Craig Tashman about the ability to annotate pdf content with "multitouch gestures." Much beyond the point and click and editing tools in Adobe, or even the multitouch abilities on tablet and "smart" devices, this allows one to use the ten fingers to coordinate, "work in patterns" and quickly edit/highlight/move and otherwise annotate documents. Great for students and anyone needing to take notes or manipulate documents.  

I can see the potential of this with our new One+ tablet app (highlight/clip your favorite section of an article) and can see the many benefits of using a tablet to manipulate a document or handout during a presentation (as a presenter or an attendee).  

Check it out - what do you think? 

The PowerPoint presentation is so dreaded nowadays that I'm surprised there hasn't been a horror movie made about it. Maybe there has: I haven't seen any of the Saw movies, where people are tested with how much torture they can take. Is PowerPoint one of the tortures? 

If you don't want to agonize your audience, though, take some advice from Enrique Garcia Cota, who offers some guidelines when choosing shapes, colors, font sizes and lines for your presentations. Consider these tips a way of softening the pain of PowerPoint.

Attend any conference presentation nowadays, and you're likely to see half the audience watching the speaker. The other half have their heads down, most notably reading their smartphones, tweeting or reading websites on their laptops/tablets (but let's not rule out the possibility that they could be sleeping, too). 

This audience distraction is a given and something that a lot of presenters and planners work with or embrace. Two app developers noticed this trend and built an app for it called Donahue. 

In an interview with Jenn Webb on O'Reilly Radar, Tim Meaney and Christopher Fahey discuss why they created the app and how it works.

"Donahue is a presentation tool built upon the premise that certain conference presentations are best delivered in conversational format," Meaney said. "The app allows the presenter to construct their points as a series of portable ideas, delivered through Donahue into a number of views. Donahue also works by acknowledging that the audience wants to have a conversation. It's pretty standard today that the audience tweets during a talk, and then hours later the presenter uploads their slide deck to SlideShare, and then later elaborates their thesis or ideas in a blog post. With Donahue, that wall between audience and presenter, and the abstraction of a slide deck, is removed. The content and ideas are immediately shared, and the audience can immediately begin discussing them. People insist upon discussion, and instead of fighting that trend—'please close your laptops'—we went the other way and joined the conversation."

Webb asked the app's creators how they think conferences should evolve and improve. 

"You just can't come to understand and master a complex topic through listening to a lecture alone," Fahey said. "Learners need to read and study at their own pace. Conferences and lectures augment and inspire those materials. But most of all, conferences should connect both speakers and audiences with the subject matter and with each other. This enables learning by empowering people to pay attention together, think about ideas together, and most importantly, talk about them in the same energized moment."

Well said, sir, well said.