Comparison of emotion perception among different cultures

Abstract

In this study, we conducted a comparative experiment on emotion perception among different cultures. Emotional components were perceived by subjects from Japan, the United States and China, all of whom had no experience living abroad. An emotional speech database without linguistic information was used in this study and evaluated using three-and/or six-emotional dimensions. Principal component analysis (PCA) indicates that the common factors could explain about 60% variance of the data among the three cultures by using a three-emotion description and about 50% variance between Japanese and Chinese cultures by using a six-emotion description. The effects of the emotion categories on perception results were investigated. The emotions of anger, joy and sadness (group 1) have consistent structures in PCA-based spaces when switching from threeemotion categories to six-emotion categories. Disgust, surprise, and fear (group 2) appeared as paired counterparts of anger, joy and sadness, respectively. When investigating the subspaces constructed by these two groups, the similarity between the two emotion groups was found to be fairly high in the two-dimensional space. The similarity becomes lower in 3-or higher dimensional spaces, but not significantly different. The results from this study suggest that a wide range of human emotions might fall into a small subspace of basic emotions.

Articulation, Acoustics and Perception of Mandarin Chinese Emotional Speech

“…In actuality, emotions are complex and often there is no single emotion expressed in an utterance (see e.g., Dang et al 2010). Moreover, the emotional labels used can lead to confusing results.…”

“…However, even with spontaneous emotional expressions (Erickson et al 2006;Spring et al 1992) or professionally-acted emotions (e.g., Dang et al 2010), not all utterances are perceived as the emotion intended by the speaker. A related theoretical question along these lines is whether emotions are expressed to be communicated to others (Ohala 1994), which predicts that particular emotions should have particular acoustic targets, or are they part of a human's cathartic system, produced to bring about relief to one's intense emotional experiencing of pain, pleasure, fear, sorrow, etc.…”

Speech emotion recognition based on listener-dependent emotion perception models

“…It is reported that female listeners are more sensitive to emotion than males [22]. The perception also depends on culture [23]. Even though listener variability affects the majority decision as to emotion perception, there is little work that considers the listener in SER.…”

“…is similar in emotion perceptions, and depends on age [21], gender [22], and cultures [23] of listeners. Given these issues, speaker dependency has often been considered for SER [24,25].…”

“…It is reported that prosodic characteristics such as pitch and laryngealization differ among speakers [20]. This is similar in emotion perceptions, and depends on age [21], gender [22], and cultures [23] of listeners. Given these issues, speaker dependency has often been considered for SER [24, 25].…”