Perception of Emotion in Conversational Speech by Younger and Older Listeners

Abstract

This study investigated whether age and/or differences in hearing sensitivity influence the perception of the emotion dimensions arousal (calm vs. aroused) and valence (positive vs. negative attitude) in conversational speech. To that end, this study specifically focused on the relationship between participants’ ratings of short affective utterances and the utterances’ acoustic parameters (pitch, intensity, and articulation rate) known to be associated with the emotion dimensions arousal and valence. Stimuli consisted of short utterances taken from a corpus of conversational speech. In two rating tasks, younger and older adults either rated arousal or valence using a 5-point scale. Mean intensity was found to be the main cue participants used in the arousal task (i.e., higher mean intensity cueing higher levels of arousal) while mean F0 was the main cue in the valence task (i.e., higher mean F0 being interpreted as more negative). Even though there were no overall age group differences in arousal or valence ratings, compared to younger adults, older adults responded less strongly to mean intensity differences cueing arousal and responded more strongly to differences in mean F0 cueing valence. Individual hearing sensitivity among the older adults did not modify the use of mean intensity as an arousal cue. However, individual hearing sensitivity generally affected valence ratings and modified the use of mean F0. We conclude that age differences in the interpretation of mean F0 as a cue for valence are likely due to age-related hearing loss, whereas age differences in rating arousal do not seem to be driven by hearing sensitivity differences between age groups (as measured by pure-tone audiometry).

The Effect of Noise on Emotion Perception in an Unknown Language

“…The utterances were initially downsampled from 44.1kHz to 16kHz and seven acoustic features were extracted that are known to correlate with the five emotions in the current study (e.g., [6][7][10] [12]): Intensity range, Mean intensity, mean F0, F0 range, F0 variance, the Hammarberg index, and the slope of the long-term average spectrum (LTAS). Since there is no standard way to quantify the relative contribution of high versus low frequency bands of the spectrum and different measures may carry complementary information that can be relevant for emotion perception an additional measure was used for spectral slope that was derived from MFCC computation (C1 -see, e.g., [15], for more details).…”

“…All acoustic features were computed using a 25ms window with 10ms hop size. Specifically, intensity was computed as the temporal energy of the speech signal (see, e.g., [23]), F0 using the YAAPT algorithm [24], the Hammarberg index by taking the difference in dB between the maximum spectral energy in the 0-2kHz band and maximum energy in the 2-5kHz band [12] [25], and the slope of the LTAS by fitting a first order polynomial into the averaged magnitude spectrum. Finally, the MFCC-based slope measure was computed by taking the first MFCC (C1) for each frame [15].…”

“…We chose seven acoustic parameters that have most often been found to correlate with the five emotions used in the current study (e.g., [6] [7] [11] [12]): Intensity range, Mean intensity, mean F0, F0 range, F0 variance, the Hammarberg index, and the slope of the long-term average spectrum (slope LTAS; [13]). In addition, we also used the spectral slope derived from the computation of MFCCs [14] [15].…”

Evaluation of the Severity of Major Depression Using a Voice Index for Emotional Arousal

“…With the progress of brain science research, the correlation between depression and arousal has been attracting attention in recent years, and many studies using physiological indices, such as electroencephalogram (e.g., late positive potential (LPP) amplitude), magnetoencephalography (e.g., neuromagnetic oscillatory activity), and skin conductance magnitude, have been conducted [ 27 , 28 , 29 ]. Additionally, the methods for assessing emotional arousal from voice have been studied, and the relationship between arousal level, vocal intensity, and pitch has been validated [ 30 , 31 ].…”

An Acoustic and Lexical Analysis of Emotional Valence in Spontaneous Speech: Autobiographical Memory Recall in Older Adults

“…Many of the studies on the (automatic) analysis of emotional expression have been carried out with healthy (young) adults, and it is unknown whether the results of these studies generalize to older adults. While speech perception of emotional expression by older adults has been investigated previously (e.g., [1]), much less attention has been paid to speech production and the realization of emotional expression by older adults. In addition, while arousal has clear and well-established correlations with specific acoustic features, much less knowledge is available for valence in relation to acoustics [2,3], in particular in spontaneous settings.…”