How Psychological Stress Affects Emotional Prosody

Abstract

We explored how experimentally induced psychological stress affects the production and recognition of vocal emotions. In Study 1a, we demonstrate that sentences spoken by stressed speakers are judged by naïve listeners as sounding more stressed than sentences uttered by non-stressed speakers. In Study 1b, negative emotions produced by stressed speakers are generally less well recognized than the same emotions produced by non-stressed speakers. Multiple mediation analyses suggest this poorer recognition of negative stimuli was due to a mismatch between the variation of volume voiced by speakers and the range of volume expected by listeners. Together, this suggests that the stress level of the speaker affects judgments made by the receiver. In Study 2, we demonstrate that participants who were induced with a feeling of stress before carrying out an emotional prosody recognition task performed worse than non-stressed participants. Overall, findings suggest detrimental effects of induced stress on interpersonal sensitivity.

Emotional Communication in Long‐Term Abstained Alcoholics

“…Overall, results revealed that participants used different acoustic patterns for the different categories expressed mirroring previous results from untrained speakers (e.g., Paulmann et al., ). Group differences between healthy controls and abstainers were particularly apparent for pitch use.…”

“…Table ) which for the most part mirrored those observed in previous studies using acted speech (e.g., Banse and Scherer, ; Paulmann and Uskul, ). Not surprisingly, recognition rates for emotional exemplars obtained here were largely lower than recognition rates obtained for materials intoned by actors (e.g., Banse and Scherer, ), but they were still above chance level (14%) and resembled recognition rates reported for materials spoken by untrained speakers (e.g., Paulmann et al., ). Exemplars were initially selected based on a discriminant analysis and only materials that were correctly identified by this analysis were used in Study 2.…”

“…To avoid bias judgments in the selection of stimuli for the recognition study, a discriminant analysis was first performed to predict emotional category membership of all stimuli collected in Study 1 (for similar approach, cf. Paulmann et al., ). In this analysis, acoustical parameters (pitch, intensity, and duration) were entered as independent variables, while the intended emotional category (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, pleasant surprise, sadness, and neutral) served as dependent variables.…”

Controlling for Confounders in Multimodal Emotion Classification via Adversarial Learning

“…Hypothesis: We expect the performance of detecting stress from representations obtained by training emotion classifiers to vary depending on the modality, and the emotion being modeled. Stress has been shown to have varying effects on both the linguistic [5] and para-linguistic [37,41] components of communication. Previous work has also demonstrated that the lexical part of speech carries more information about valence while the para-linguistic part carries more information about activation [22].…”

“…In this work, we study how an extraneous psychological factor, stress, affects multimodal (acoustic+lexical) emotion classifiers. Stress can affect how individuals produce and perceive emotion [37]. Yet, the effect of stress levels on the performance of state-of-the-art emotion recognition systems has not been explored.…”