Do Individual Differences Influence Moment-by-Moment Reports of Emotion Perceived in Music and Speech Prosody?

Abstract

Comparison of emotion perception in music and prosody has the potential to contribute to an understanding of their speculated shared evolutionary origin. Previous research suggests shared sensitivity to and processing of music and speech, but less is known about how emotion perception in the auditory domain might be influenced by individual differences. Personality, emotional intelligence, gender, musical training and age exert some influence on discrete, summative judgments of perceived emotion in music and speech stimuli. However, music and speech are temporal phenomena, and little is known about whether individual differences influence moment-by-moment perception of emotion in these domains. A behavioral study collected two main types of data: continuous ratings of perceived emotion while listening to extracts of music and speech, using a computer interface which modeled emotion on two dimensions (arousal and valence), and demographic information including measures of personality (TIPI) and emotional intelligence (TEIQue-SF). Functional analysis of variance on the time series data revealed a small number of statistically significant differences associated with Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, musical training and age. The results indicate that individual differences exert limited influence on continuous judgments of dynamic, naturalistic expressions. We suggest that this reflects a reliance on acoustic cues to emotion in moment-by-moment judgments of perceived emotions and is further evidence of the shared sensitivity to and processing of music and speech.

Links between Musicality and Vocal Emotion Perception

“…Finally,Waaramaa and Leisiö (2013) investigated the link between musical interests and emotional prosody perception in a large-scale cross-cultural study across five different countries(Estonia, Finland, Russia, Sweden, USA). Musical interests tended to have a positive effect on vocal emotion Musicality and Vocal Emotion Perception 15 identification, but like inDibben et al (2018), this finding was based on very few self-reported items only.…”

Does Music Training Improve Emotion Recognition Abilities? A Critical Review

“…Performance is measured in terms of the accuracy with which emotions are recognized. There are also studies evaluating other aspects of emotional processing, however, including valence and arousal perception (Dibben et al, 2018), and inferences of distress (Parsons et al, 2014) and depression in voices (Nilsonne & Sundberg, 1985). Trained participants are usually adults with at least five years of classical music training, which is in line with the broader literature on music training (Zhang et al, 2018).…”

“…Importantly, there are six studies that failed to find training effects. This was observed for emotional prosody recognition in linguistic stimuli including words, pseudowords, and sentences (Başkent et al, 2018;Dibben et al, 2018;Mualem & Lavidor, 2015;Park et al, 2015;Trimmer & Cuddy, 2008), for tone analogues of spoken sentences (Trimmer & Cuddy, 2008), and for humming voices (Weijkamp & Sadakata, 2016). For instance, Trimmer and Cuddy (2008) tested 100 participants with varying levels of music training, and found that emotion recognition in sentences and tone analogues correlated with emotional intelligence but not with music training.…”

“…It is also possible that in some cases the samples included participants who were no longer practicing their instruments. Only three of the studies reporting null results specified that participants were active musicians (Başkent et al, 2018;Dibben et al, 2018;Mualem & Lavidor, 2015). This matter because behavioural and brain effects of learning-induced plasticity might be lost if not practiced (evidence from taxi drivers, Woollett et al, 2009; evidence from juggling skills, Draganski et al, 2004).…”

Transfer learning from speech to music: towards language-sensitive emotion recognition models

“…There is a strong relationship between the recognition of perceived emotions in both speech and music: shared taxonomies of emotion [1], [2], shared biological and evolutionary processes in the brain [3], [4], similar acoustic cues that are related in both domains [5], [6], and models that attempt to recognize perceived emotions across domains [7], [8]. Researchers have evaluated how individual differences influence emotions perceived in music and speech prosody by English speakers [9]. They found that the ratings on speech are unaffected by factors such as personality, musical training, emotional intelligence and gender, but may be influenced by age.…”