Vocal Expression of Emotions in Normally Hearing and Hearing-Impaired Infants

Scheiner, Elisabeth; Hammerschmidt, Kurt; Jürgens, Uwe; Zwirner, Petra

doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2005.09.001

Cited by 37 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…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. While affective prosody usually unfolds across the course of an utterance, it can also be uttered in the form of short bursts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pitch underlies activation of the vocal system during affective vocalization

Belyk

Brown

2015

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

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Affective prosody is that aspect of speech that conveys a speaker's emotional state through modulations in various vocal parameters, most prominently pitch. While a large body of research implicates the cingulate vocalization area in controlling affective vocalizations in monkeys, no systematic test of functional homology for this area has yet been reported in humans. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain activations when subjects produced affective vocalizations in the form of exclamations vs non-affective vocalizations with similar pitch contours. We also examined the perception of affective vocalizations by having participants make judgments about either the emotions being conveyed by recorded affective vocalizations or the pitch contours of the same vocalizations. Production of affective vocalizations and matched pitch contours activated a highly overlapping set of brain areas, including the larynx-phonation area of the primary motor cortex and a region of the anterior cingulate cortex that is consistent with the macro-anatomical position of the cingulate vocalization area. This overlap contradicts the dominant view that these areas form two distinct vocal pathways with dissociable functions. Instead, we propose that these brain areas are nodes in a single vocal network, with an emphasis on pitch modulation as a vehicle for affective expression.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pitch underlies activation of the vocal system during affective vocalization

Belyk

Brown

2015

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

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“…Jürgens, 2009). Moreover, congenitally deaf human infants produce species-specific calls without any auditory feedback, whereas language-like babbling in such infants is delayed or absent (Scheiner, Hammerschmidt, Jürgens, & Zwirner, 2006). The limbic and cortical pathways are thus to some extent functionally distinct.…”

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confidence: 99%

Nonlinguistic vocalizations from online amateur videos for emotion research: A validated corpus

2016

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This study introduces a corpus of 260 naturalistic human nonlinguistic vocalizations representing nine emotions: amusement, anger, disgust, effort, fear, joy, pain, pleasure, and sadness. The recognition accuracy in a rating task varied greatly per emotion, from <40% for joy and pain, to >70% for amusement, pleasure, fear, and sadness. In contrast, the raters' linguistic-cultural group had no effect on recognition accuracy: The predominantly English-language corpus was classified with similar accuracies by participants from Brazil, Russia, Sweden, and the UK/USA. Supervised random forest models classified the sounds as accurately as the human raters. The best acoustic predictors of emotion were pitch, harmonicity, and the spacing and regularity of syllables. This corpus of ecologically valid emotional vocalizations can be filtered to include only sounds with high recognition rates, in order to study reactions to emotional stimuli of known perceptual types (reception side), or can be used in its entirety to study the association between affective states and vocal expressions (production side).

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“…Non-verbal vocalisations are the most phylogenetically continuous of all expressive channels and differ from speech prosody in other important ways: They are not constrained by articulatory movements related to speech production and involve distinct production mechanisms, resulting in distinct acoustic properties (Scott, Sauter, & McGettigan, 2010). Laughter and crying are deeply grounded in human biology-they emerge early in development, do not require auditory experience (Scheiner, Hammerschmidt, Juergens, & Zwirner, 2006) and are cross-culturally recognised (Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, & Scott, 2010). Importantly, apart from rare exceptions (e.g., Aviezer, Trope, & Todorov, 2012), the literature on context effects is based on acted displays for which actors pose expressions without feeling the corresponding emotions.…”

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confidence: 99%

I thought that I heard you laughing: Contextual facial expressions modulate the perception of authentic laughter and crying

Lavan

Lima

Harvey

et al. 2014

Cognition and Emotion

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It is well established that categorising the emotional content of facial expressions may differ depending on contextual information. Whether this malleability is observed in the auditory domain and in genuine emotion expressions is poorly explored. We examined the perception of authentic laughter and crying in the context of happy, neutral and sad facial expressions. Participants rated the vocalisations on separate unipolar scales of happiness and sadness and on arousal. Although they were instructed to focus exclusively on the vocalisations, consistent context effects were found: For both laughter and crying, emotion judgements were shifted towards the information expressed by the face. These modulations were independent of response latencies and were larger for more emotionally ambiguous vocalisations. No effects of context were found for arousal ratings. These findings suggest that the automatic encoding of contextual information during emotion perception generalises across modalities, to purely non-verbal vocalisations, and is not confined to acted expressions.

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Vocal Expression of Emotions in Normally Hearing and Hearing-Impaired Infants

Cited by 37 publications

References 37 publications

Pitch underlies activation of the vocal system during affective vocalization

Pitch underlies activation of the vocal system during affective vocalization

Nonlinguistic vocalizations from online amateur videos for emotion research: A validated corpus

I thought that I heard you laughing: Contextual facial expressions modulate the perception of authentic laughter and crying

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