Can perceivers recognise emotions from spontaneous expressions?

Sauter, Disa; Fischer, Agneta H.

doi:10.1080/02699931.2017.1320978

Cited by 63 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…They were thus not real-life emotional expressions. While the methods of emotion simulation offer high experimental control, the validity of prosodic stimuli derived from these measures is limited (Scherer, 1986 ) and may boost recognition accuracy (Sauter and Fischer, 2017 ). Previous studies found that speakers often portray stereotypes of emotions and might differ in the quality of their emotional portrayals (e.g., one speaker might be very good at portraying happiness but not fear, whereas another speaker's performance might show the opposite pattern; Scherer, 1986 ; Banse and Scherer, 1996 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender Differences in the Recognition of Vocal Emotions

Lausen

Schacht

2018

Front. Psychol.

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The conflicting findings from the few studies conducted with regard to gender differences in the recognition of vocal expressions of emotion have left the exact nature of these differences unclear. Several investigators have argued that a comprehensive understanding of gender differences in vocal emotion recognition can only be achieved by replicating these studies while accounting for influential factors such as stimulus type, gender-balanced samples, number of encoders, decoders, and emotional categories. This study aimed to account for these factors by investigating whether emotion recognition from vocal expressions differs as a function of both listeners' and speakers' gender. A total of N = 290 participants were randomly and equally allocated to two groups. One group listened to words and pseudo-words, while the other group listened to sentences and affect bursts. Participants were asked to categorize the stimuli with respect to the expressed emotions in a fixed-choice response format. Overall, females were more accurate than males when decoding vocal emotions, however, when testing for specific emotions these differences were small in magnitude. Speakers' gender had a significant impact on how listeners' judged emotions from the voice. The group listening to words and pseudo-words had higher identification rates for emotions spoken by male than by female actors, whereas in the group listening to sentences and affect bursts the identification rates were higher when emotions were uttered by female than male actors. The mixed pattern for emotion-specific effects, however, indicates that, in the vocal channel, the reliability of emotion judgments is not systematically influenced by speakers' gender and the related stereotypes of emotional expressivity. Together, these results extend previous findings by showing effects of listeners' and speakers' gender on the recognition of vocal emotions. They stress the importance of distinguishing these factors to explain recognition ability in the processing of emotional prosody.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender Differences in the Recognition of Vocal Emotions

Lausen

Schacht

2018

Front. Psychol.

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“…These findings suggest that acted vocalizations are similar, but not identical, to spontaneous expressions. Thus, in future research, potential differences between acted and spontaneous vocalization, as well as the role of emotional intensity, should be considered (see also Sauter & Fischer, 2018).…”

Section: Methods For Eliciting Emotional Vocalizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Good vibrations: A review of vocal expressions of positive emotions

2020

Self Cite

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Researchers examining nonverbal communication of emotions are becoming increasingly interested in differentiations between different positive emotional states like interest, relief, and pride. But despite the importance of the voice in communicating emotion in general and positive emotion in particular, there is to date no systematic review of what characterizes vocal expressions of different positive emotions. Furthermore, integration and synthesis of current findings are lacking. In this review, we comprehensively review studies (N = 108) investigating acoustic features relating to specific positive emotions in speech prosody and nonverbal vocalizations. We find that happy voices are generally loud with considerable variability in loudness, have high and variable pitch, and are high in the first two formant frequencies. When specific positive emotions are directly compared with each other, pitch mean, loudness mean, and speech rate differ across positive emotions, with patterns mapping onto clusters of emotions, so-called emotion families. For instance, pitch is higher for epistemological emotions (amusement, interest, relief), moderate for savouring emotions (contentment and pleasure), and lower for a prosocial emotion (admiration). Some, but not all, of the differences in acoustic patterns also map on to differences in arousal levels. We end by pointing to limitations in extant work and making concrete proposals for future research on positive emotions in the voice.

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“…A third limitation is that, as with many standardised tests, the emotional expressions we used to evaluate accurate recognition were posed by actors. Although there is evidence that recognition of posed and spontaneous facial expressions overlaps considerably (Sauter & Fischer, 2018), more research with emotional expressions in real life situations may provide additional insight into the role of emotion differentiation in emotion recognition. This work may also include other kinds of emotional expressions, such as speech content.…”

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowing me, knowing you: emotion differentiation in oneself is associated with recognition of others’ emotions

Israelashvili

Oosterwijk

Sauter

et al. 2019

Cognition and Emotion

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Previous research has found that individuals vary greatly in emotion differentiation, that is, the extent to which they distinguish between different emotions when reporting on their own feelings. Building on previous work that has shown that emotion differentiation is associated with individual differences in intrapersonal functions, the current study asks whether emotion differentiation is also related to interpersonal skills. Specifically, we examined whether individuals who are high in emotion differentiation would be more accurate in recognising others' emotional expressions. We report two studies in which we used an established paradigm tapping negative emotion differentiation and several emotion recognition tasks. In Study 1 (N = 363), we found that individuals high in emotion differentiation were more accurate in recognising others' emotional facial expressions. Study 2 (N = 217), replicated this finding using emotion recognition tasks with varying amounts of emotional information. These findings suggest that the knowledge we use to understand our own emotional experience also helps us understand the emotions of others. ARTICLE HISTORY

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Can perceivers recognise emotions from spontaneous expressions?

Cited by 63 publications

References 41 publications

Gender Differences in the Recognition of Vocal Emotions

Gender Differences in the Recognition of Vocal Emotions

Good vibrations: A review of vocal expressions of positive emotions

Knowing me, knowing you: emotion differentiation in oneself is associated with recognition of others’ emotions

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