Emotion Inferences from Vocal Expression Correlate Across Languages and Cultures

Abstract

JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY Scherer et al. / VOCAL EMOTION EXPRESSION Whereas the perception of emotion from facial expression has been extensively studied cross-culturally, little is known about judges' ability to infer emotion from vocal cues. This article reports the results from a study conducted in nine countries in Europe, the United States, and Asia on vocal emotion portrayals of anger, sadness, fear, joy, and neutral voice as produced by professional German actors. Data show an overall accuracy of 66% across all emotions and countries. Although accuracy was substantially better than chance, there were sizable differences ranging from 74% in Germany to 52% in Indonesia. However, patterns of confusion were very similar across all countries. These data suggest the existence of similar inference rules from vocal expression across cultures. Generally, accuracy decreased with increasing language dissimilarity from German in spite of the use of language-free speech samples. It is concluded that culture-and language-specific paralinguistic patterns may influence the decoding process.

Do Hearing Aids Improve Affect Perception?

“…Emotion inferences from speech correlate across languages, particularly for similar languages (cf. Scherer et al 2001). Given the close relationship between German and Swiss German, the way affect is encoded in Swiss German is not expected to differ considerably from that in German as spoken in Germany.…”

Análise da variação prosódica em diferentes estilos de reportagens telejornalísticas

“…Voice features contribute to vocal plasticity so that the communicative intention is appropriate in the prosody, which can be defined as a set of speech features related to variations in pitch, intensity, duration and pause placement (10)(11)(12)(13)(14) . Prosodic variations convey information relevant to the meaning of the narration and define the characteristics of the voice dynamic, such as happiness or sadness.…”

The vocal communication of different kinds of smile

“…Therefore, different channels (or modes) of expression are likely to be involved in a single communicative act. The ability to discriminate audibly between vocal expressions of different categorical emotions has been found in different cultures and in some different languages (Scherer et al, 2001;Scherer & Wallbott, 1994). Investigating the auditory detection of facial expression is crucial not just for our understanding of perceptual processes but also because it could be vital for helping people with sensory deficits.…”