Recognition of emotions by voice and facial expression by medical students

Abstract

Purpose To evaluate the ability of medical students to recognize emotions through voice and facial expression through assessments of emotional perception of vocal intonation and functional expressions. Methods Observational cross-sectional study. To evaluate the recognition of emotions by facial expressions, a test composed of 20 videos of facial microexpressions was used, and to evaluate the emotional recognition by voice, the protocol of prosodic impressions of basic emotions, based on the Burkhardt database, was used. For statistical analysis, the Friedman, Shapiro-Wilk, Student t, Mann-Whitney and Pearson or Spearman correlation coefficient tests were used. Results The study consisted of 38 students, with an average age of 20.8 (±2.5). The recognition of emotions through the voice was significantly superior to the one through facial expressions. There was a positive correlation between age and the ability to recognize emotions through facial expressions. Males had a significantly higher hit rate than females in the ability to recognize emotions through facial expression. The emotions with the highest average success rates through facial expression were surprise, joy and contempt, while, through the voice, the emotions were anger, fear and sadness. Conclusion The ability to recognize emotions by medical students was greater when assessing emotional perception through the voice.