Aspects of Cultural Communication in Recognizing Emotions

Abstract

The study addresses cultural influence in the recognition of moderately expressed emotions in a second language (L2) and foreign speech. The web-based listening test consisted of context-free sentences drawn from the Estonian Emotional Speech Corpus. The task was to recognize the emotion (joy, anger, sadness) or neutrality of each sentence without seeing the speaker. Three adult groups participated: (1) 36 Estonians, with Estonian as mother tongue; (2) 16 highly educated Russians living in Estonia, with Russian as their mother tongue and Estonian as a second language; (3) 16 highly educated Russians living in Russia, with Russian mother tongue and no knowledge of Estonian. The results showed a significant difference between Estonians and Russians living in Estonia in their recognition of joy and neutrality; Russians living in Russia differed significantly from Estonians and Russians living in Estonia on all emotion scores. This confirms that cultural norms are mastered through interaction: to recognize vocal emotions expressed in another language it is necessary to live in the culture and communicate in its language.

Experimental Approaches to Socio‐Linguistics: Usage and Interpretation of Non‐Verbal and Verbal Expressions in Cross‐ Cultural Communication

“…The impact of cultural learning on the decoding of expressions was also studied by directly comparing the recognition accuracy between groups of native speakers, second language speakers (L2) and foreign language speakers of target expressions [32]. Three listener groups, the Estonian native speakers, the Russian native speakers who lived in Russia and the Russian speakers who lived in Estonia, completed web-based experiments in which spoken sentences, which conveyed different expressions (joy, anger, sadness and neutrality) in the tone of voice, were judged with online platforms outside the lab setting.…”

The influence of language and culture on the understanding of vocal emotions

“…Thus, the Russians living in Estonia recognized Estonian emotions to an extent that was rather more like the local Estonians than the Russians living in Russia. Hence Altrov (2013) concluded that joy, anger and neutrality are expressed in a culture-specific manner, while the expression of sadness could be universal.…”

“…For example, everyday joy is a pleasant rather than exalted feeling, anger is hardly expressed as rage, but rather as irony or resentment, and sadness is usually expressed as anxiety rather than despair. Therefore we can say that universality applies only to the classification of emotions into positive and negative, whereas the expression and understanding of emotions depend on culture and language (Altrov 2013, Altrov and Pajupuu 2010, Elfenbein 2013, Kamaruddin et al 2012, and Pell et al 2009). …”

“…Altrov 2013, Bryant and Barrett 2008, and Jürgens et al 2013). According to Laukka et al (2014) as well as to Scherer et al (2011) the universality of emotions is supported by the fact that if a listening task requires the classification of emotions of any culture into predetermined categories, recognition accuracy is b etter than chance probability.…”

“…According to the results of Altrov (2013), emotion identification involves both universal and sociocultural factors. Her listening test required that three groups of participants -native Estonian speakers living in Estonia, native Russian speakers living in Estonia who can speak Estonian, and native Russian speakers living in Russia who cannot speak Estonian -listen to Estonian sentences classifiable by emotions.…”