This study tested the hypothesis that emotions may be identified earlier than attitudes in the flow of speech. The gating paradigm was chosen to investigate if such differentiation between emotions and attitudes was possible. Perception test results included the following variables: the identification point, the isolation point and the confusion matrices. Acoustic analysis was conducted and linked to the perception results. Anger and sadness were separated from the other studied affective states on the basis of the results analysis. Interestingly, happiness followed the identification pattern found for attitudes. The future directions of work are presented.