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.

This study extends previous work on emotion communication across cultures with a large-scale investigation of the physical expression cues in vocal tone. In doing so, it provides the first direct test of a key proposition of dialect theory, namely that greater accuracy of detecting emotions from one's own cultural group-known as in-group advantage-results from a match between culturally specific schemas in emotional expression style and culturally specific schemas in emotion recognition. Study 1 used stimuli from 100 professional actors from five English-speaking nations vocally conveying 11 emotional states (anger, contempt, fear, happiness, interest, lust, neutral, pride, relief, sadness, and shame) using standard-content sentences. Detailed acoustic analyses showed many similarities across groups, and yet also systematic group differences. This provides evidence for cultural accents in expressive style at the level of acoustic cues. In Study 2, listeners evaluated these expressions in a 5 × 5 design balanced across groups. Cross-cultural accuracy was greater than expected by chance. However, there was also in-group advantage, which varied across emotions. A lens model analysis of fundamental acoustic properties examined patterns in emotional expression and perception within and across groups. Acoustic cues were used relatively similarly across groups both to produce and judge emotions, and yet there were also subtle cultural differences. Speakers appear to have a culturally nuanced schema for enacting vocal tones via acoustic cues, and perceivers have a culturally nuanced schema in judging them. Consistent with dialect theory's prediction, in-group judgments showed a greater match between these schemas used for emotional expression and perception. (PsycINFO Database Record

The current study investigated what can be understood from another person’s tone of voice. Participants from five English-speaking nations (Australia, India, Kenya, Singapore, and the United States) listened to vocal expressions of nine positive and nine negative affective states recorded by actors from their own nation. In response, they wrote open-ended judgments of what they believed the actor was trying to express. Responses cut across the chronological emotion process and included descriptions of situations, cognitive appraisals, feeling states, physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, emotion regulation, and attempts at social influence. Accuracy in terms of emotion categories was overall modest, whereas accuracy in terms of valence and arousal was more substantial. Coding participants’ 57,380 responses yielded a taxonomy of 56 categories, which included affective states as well as person descriptors, communication behaviors, and abnormal states. Open-ended responses thus reveal a wide range of ways in which people spontaneously perceive the intent behind emotional speech prosody.

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Culture encompasses, without being reducible to, values and norms that underpin a people"s way of thinking and doing things. Development on the other hand can be analyzed as any progression toward a goal. If this is the case then we instantly appreciate the nexus between the two concepts. A community will have a certain perception of the world (culture) and how it would like to transform that world to its own good (development) through various initiatives and processes.Some scholars argue that development should be anchored in a people"s culture. It cannot be brought to them from the outside because that would be someone else" idea of development (Boukary 2003). Others might argue that development can be introduced from outside to create awareness, then the culture of the people accommodates and domesticates it. In market studies terms, development should be a felt need by a community to develop a product in the case of the first theory or a product introduced into the market that people learn to appreciate in the latter scenario. We believe the two models are complementary. This paper discusses the concepts of culture and development with respect to the post-election violence in Kenya that left 1,200 people dead and another 400,000 displaced from their homes. We recast the violence within the wider context of the history, cultural diversity and economics of Kenya. How can an island of peace for 45 years plunge into senseless killings overnight that negate a sound development record of 7% GDP growth?