Do People Agree on How Positive Emotions are Expressed? A Survey of Four Emotions and Five Modalities across 11 Cultures

Abstract

While much is known about how negative emotions are expressed in different modalities, our understanding of the nonverbal expressions of positive emotions remains limited. In the present research, we draw upon disparate lines of theoretical and empirical work on positive emotions, and systematically examine which channels are thought to be used for expressing four positive emotions: feeling moved, gratitude, interest, and triumph. Employing the intersubjective approach, an established tool in cross-cultural psychology, we first examined how the four positive emotions were reported to be expressed in a U.S.A. community sample (Study 1: n = 1015). We next confirmed the cross-cultural generalizability of our findings by surveying respondents from ten countries that diverged on cultural values (Study 2: n = 1834). Feeling moved was thought to be signaled with facial expressions, gratitude with the use of words, interest with words, face and voice, and triumph with body posture, vocal cues, facial expressions, and words. These findings provide cross-culturally consistent findings of differential expressions across positive emotions. Notably, positive emotions were mostly thought to be expressed via modalities that go beyond the face. In addition, we hope that the intersubjective approach will constitute a useful tool for researchers studying nonverbal expressions.

Textless Speech Emotion Conversion using Discrete and Decomposed Representations

“…When considering non-parallel data, new techniques have been proposed to learn the translation between emotional domains with CycleGAN (Zhou et al, 2020a) and StarGAN (Rizos et al, 2020), to disentangle the emotional elements from speech with auto-encoders Zhou et al, 2021b), and to leverage text-to-speech or Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) . Studies have also revealed that the emotions can be expressed through universal principles that are shared across different individuals and cultures (Ekman, 1992;Manokara et al, 2021). This motivates the study of multispeaker (Shankar et al, 2019b(Shankar et al, , 2020, and speaker-independent emotional voice conversion (Zhou et al, 2020b;Choi and Hahn, 2021).…”