This paper proposes the use of neutral reference models to detect local emotional prominence in the fundamental frequency. A novel approach based on functional data analysis (FDA) is presented, which aims to capture the intrinsic variability of F0 contours. The neutral models are represented by a basis of functions and the testing F0 contour is characterized by the projections onto that basis. For a given F0 contour, we estimate the functional principal component analysis (PCA) projections, which are used as features for emotion detection. The approach is evaluated with lexicon-dependent (i.e., one functional PCA basis per sentence) and lexicon-independent (i.e., a single functional PCA basis across sentences) models. The experimental results show that the proposed system can lead to accuracies as high as 75.8% in binary emotion classification, which is 6.2% higher than the accuracy achieved by a benchmark system trained with global F0 statistics. The approach can be implemented at sub-sentence level (e.g., 0.5 s segments), facilitating the detection of localized emotional information conveyed within the sentence. The approach is validated with the SEMAINE database, which is a spontaneous corpus. The results indicate that the proposed scheme can be effectively employed in real applications to detect emotional speech. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.