Cross-cultural decoding of positive and negative non-linguistic emotion vocalizations

Abstract

Which emotions are associated with universally recognized non-verbal signals?We address this issue by examining how reliably non-linguistic vocalizations (affect bursts) can convey emotions across cultures. Actors from India, Kenya, Singapore, and USA were instructed to produce vocalizations that would convey nine positive and nine negative emotions to listeners. The vocalizations were judged by Swedish listeners using a within-valence forced-choice procedure, where positive and negative emotions were judged in separate experiments. Results showed that listeners could recognize a wide range of positive and negative emotions with accuracy above chance. For positive emotions, we observed the highest recognition rates for relief, followed by lust, interest, serenity and positive surprise, with affection and pride receiving the lowest recognition rates. Anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and negative surprise received the highest recognition rates for negative emotions, with the lowest rates observed for guilt and shame. By way of summary, results showed that the voice can reveal both basic emotions and several positive emotions other than happiness across cultures, but self-conscious emotions such as guilt, pride, and shame seem not to be well recognized from non-linguistic vocalizations.

Preferential decoding of emotion from human non-linguistic vocalizations versus speech prosody

“…When directly compared (which is rare), listeners tend to be superior in labeling vocalizations over prosody, especially for anger, joy, sadness, disgust and fear (Hawk et al, 2009). Nonetheless, cross-cultural studies that have presented emotional prosody (Pell, Paulmann, Dara, Alasseri, & Kotz, 2009;Scherer, Banse, & Wallbott, 2001; Thompson & Balkwill, 2006) or vocalizations (Laukka et al, 2013;Sauter & Eimer, 2009;Sauter & Scott, 2007) argue that each type of vocal expression possesses a 'universal' set of acoustic features that uniquely refers to different basic emotions, which predict how listeners assign meaning to these signals. Recent data on speech-embedded emotions are also beginning to reveal the time course of emotional prosody recognition based on behavioral judgments of stimuli gated into different stimulus durations; this work shows that acoustic patterns in speech differentiate rapidly to reveal basic emotional meanings to listeners after hearing approximately 400-800ms of acoustic information (Cornew, Carver, & Love, 2010;Jiang, Paulmann, Robin, & Pell, in press;Pell & Kotz, 2011;Rigoulot, Wassiliwizky, & Pell, 2013).…”

Comparing the acoustic expression of emotion in the speaking and the singing voice

“…The parallelism of human emotion expression in speech and music has been demonstrated by a comprehensive review of empirical studies on patterns of acoustic parameters in these two forms of human affect communication (Juslin and Laukka, 2003). The assumption of powerful "affect primitives" in speech and language is also supported by research on the recognition of emotion in speech (Bryant and Barrett, 2008;Laukka et al, 2013b;Pell et al, 2009;Sauter et al, 2010;Scherer et al, 2001) and music (Laukka et al, 2013a). This research has generally shown the existence of both a fairly high degree of universality of the underlying expression and recognition mechanisms and of sizeable differences between cultures, especially for self-reflective, social, and moral emotions.…”

“…In consequence, we expect that emotion expression is similar in speaking and singing voice -because of the evolutionary origin of the expression mechanisms and the need for authenticity (Maynard Smith and Harper, 2003;Mortillaro et al, 2013). Obviously, there may well be important differences across languages and cultures due in large part to language characteristics such as phonemic structure or intonation rules.…”

Pitch underlies activation of the vocal system during affective vocalization

“…Listeners can reliably recognize a broad range of vocally expressed emotions, even when the spoken words are unrelated to the emotion (Fairbanks and Pronovost, 1938;Belin et al, 2008;SimonThomas et al, 2009) or when recordings are filtered to remove segmental content (Lieberman and Michaels, 1962). Unlike the words that make up the segmental aspect of speech, affective vocalizations can be recognized across languages (Laukka et al, 2013), between cultures that have had only minimal historical contact (Sauter et al, 2010)-although with some cultural variation (Scherer and Wallbott, 1994)-and across species (Faragó et al, 2014). Indeed, infants who are hearing-impaired produce affective vocalizations that are acoustically similar to those of normal-hearing infants (Scheiner et al, 2004(Scheiner et al, , 2006.…”