The conflicting findings from the few studies conducted with regard to gender differences in the recognition of vocal expressions of emotion have left the exact nature of these differences unclear. Several investigators have argued that a comprehensive understanding of gender differences in vocal emotion recognition can only be achieved by replicating these studies while accounting for influential factors such as stimulus type, gender-balanced samples, number of encoders, decoders, and emotional categories. This study aimed to account for these factors by investigating whether emotion recognition from vocal expressions differs as a function of both listeners' and speakers' gender. A total of N = 290 participants were randomly and equally allocated to two groups. One group listened to words and pseudo-words, while the other group listened to sentences and affect bursts. Participants were asked to categorize the stimuli with respect to the expressed emotions in a fixed-choice response format. Overall, females were more accurate than males when decoding vocal emotions, however, when testing for specific emotions these differences were small in magnitude. Speakers' gender had a significant impact on how listeners' judged emotions from the voice. The group listening to words and pseudo-words had higher identification rates for emotions spoken by male than by female actors, whereas in the group listening to sentences and affect bursts the identification rates were higher when emotions were uttered by female than male actors. The mixed pattern for emotion-specific effects, however, indicates that, in the vocal channel, the reliability of emotion judgments is not systematically influenced by speakers' gender and the related stereotypes of emotional expressivity. Together, these results extend previous findings by showing effects of listeners' and speakers' gender on the recognition of vocal emotions. They stress the importance of distinguishing these factors to explain recognition ability in the processing of emotional prosody.

BackgroundUrinary incontinence (UI) is a distressing condition affecting at least 5 million women in England and Wales. Traditionally, physiotherapy for UI comprises pelvic floor muscle training, but although evidence suggests this can be effective it is also recognised that benefits are often compromised by patient motivation and commitment. In addition, there is increasing recognition that physical symptoms alone are poor indicators of the impact of incontinence on individuals’ lives. Consequently, more holistic approaches to the treatment of UI, such as Modified Pilates (MP) have been recommended. This study aimed to provide preliminary findings about the effectiveness of a 6-week course of MP classes as an adjunct to standard physiotherapy care for UI, and to test the feasibility of a randomised controlled trial (RCT) design.MethodsThe study design was a single centre pilot RCT, plus qualitative interviews. 73 women referred to Women’s Health Physiotherapy Services for UI at Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust were randomly assigned to two groups: a 6-week course of MP classes in addition to standard physiotherapy care (intervention) or standard physiotherapy care only (control). Main outcome measures were self-reported UI, quality of life and self-esteem at baseline (T1), completion of treatment (T2), and 5 months after randomisation (T3). Qualitative interviews were conducted with a subgroup at T2 and T3. Due to the nature of the intervention blinding of participants, physiotherapists and researchers was not feasible.ResultsPost-intervention data revealed a range of benefits for women who attended MP classes and who had lower symptom severity at baseline: improved self-esteem (p = 0.032), decreased social embarrassment (p = 0.026) and lower impact on normal daily activities (p = 0.025). In contrast, women with higher symptom severity showed improvement in their personal relationships (p = 0.017). Qualitative analysis supported these findings and also indicated that MP classes could positively influence attitudes to exercise, diet and wellbeing.ConclusionsA definitive RCT is feasible but will require a large sample size to inform clinical practice.Trial registrationISRCTN74075972 Registered 12/12/12 (Retrospectively registered).Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12905-017-0503-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Human speech expresses emotional meaning not only through semantics, but also through certain attributes of the voice, such as pitch or loudness. In investigations of vocal emotion recognition, there is considerable variability in the types of stimuli and procedures used to examine their influence on emotion recognition. In addition, accurate metacognition was argued to promote correct and confident interpretations in emotion recognition tasks. Nevertheless, such associations have rarely been studied previously. We addressed this gap by examining the impact of vocal stimulus type and prosodic speech attributes on emotion recognition and a person's confidence in a given response. We analysed a total of 1038 emotional expressions according to a baseline set of 13 prosodic acoustic parameters. Results showed that these parameters provided sufficient discrimination between expressions of emotional categories to permit accurate statistical classification. Emotion recognition and confidence judgments were found to depend on stimulus material as they could be reliably predicted by different constellations of acoustic features. Finally, results indicated that listeners' accuracy and confidence judgements were significantly higher for affect bursts than speech-embedded stimuli and that the correct classification of emotional expressions elicited increased confidence judgements. Together, these findings show that vocal stimulus type and prosodic attributes of speech strongly influence emotion recognition and listeners' confidence in these given responses.

The present research examined relationships between parental autonomy support, parental psychological control, and Chinese emerging adults’ autonomous regulation in their university studies as well as dysregulation in social media engagement. A total of 287 (102 female and 185 male) Chinese university students reported on their perceived parenting styles, psychological needs, and behavior regulation. Results showed that basic psychological need satisfaction was positively associated with parental autonomy support and autonomous regulation of learning; need frustration was positively correlated with parental psychological control and dysregulation in social media engagement. More importantly, psychological need frustration was a mediator of the relation between parental psychological control and dysregulation in social media engagement. Our findings suggest that students living in an autonomy-supportive familial environment tend to have satisfied psychological needs as well as autonomous learning behavior. Impairment of psychological needs could be one of the mechanisms through which psychologically controlling parenting was linked to dysregulation of social media use in Chinese culture.

Successful emotion recognition is a key component of our socio-emotional communication skills. However, little is known about the factors impacting males' accuracy in emotion recognition tasks. This pre-registered study examined potential candidates, focusing on the modality of stimulus presentation, emotion category, and individual hormone levels. We obtained accuracy and reaction time scores from 312 males who categorized voice, face and voice-face stimuli for nonverbal emotional content. Results showed that recognition accuracy was significantly higher in the audio-visual than in the auditory or visual modality. While no significant association was found for testosterone and cortisol alone, the effect of the interaction with recognition accuracy and reaction time was significant, but small. Our results establish that audio-visual congruent stimuli enhance recognition accuracy and provide novel empirical support by showing that the interaction of testosterone and cortisol modulate to some extent males' accuracy and response times in emotion recognition tasks.