Factors in the recognition of vocally expressed emotions: A comparison of four languages

Pell, Marc D.; Paulmann, Silke; Dara, Chinar; Alasseri, Areej; Kotz, Sonja A.

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2009.07.005

Cited by 291 publications

(310 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Therefore we claim that the restricted pitch variation of the tone 1 group does not affect the perception of vocal emotions. The perceptual characteristics are fairly similar across tone groups in Mandarin Chinese, which supports the proposal of Pell et al (2009) that perceptual attributes of vocal emotion are governed by universal principles.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

“…Sadness, however, shows the opposite pattern: A long duration, low intensity, low mean pitch, and a small pitch range. Therefore vocal expression of emotion seems universal and unaffected by language (Pell et al, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Vocal expression of emotion is one of the various paralinguistic functions. Conventional wisdom about the vocal expression of emotion is that different emotions are characterized by distinct acoustic features (Murray and Arnott, 1993), and the acoustic characteristics of emotions are similar across languages (Banse and Scherer, 1996;Pell et al, 2009). For example, happiness has a short duration, high intensity, high mean pitch, and a large pitch range.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Does restriction of pitch variation affect the perception of vocal emotions in Mandarin Chinese?

Wang

Lee

2014

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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This study reports a finding about vocal expressions of emotion in Mandarin Chinese. Production and perception experiments used the same tone and mixed tone sequences to test whether pitch variation is restricted due to the presence of lexical tones. Results showed that the restriction of pitch variation occurred in all high level tone sequences (tone 1 group) with the expression of happiness but did not happen for other dynamic tone groups. However, perception analysis revealed that all the emotions in every tone group received high identification rates; this indicates that listeners used other cues for encoding happiness in the tone 1 group. This study demonstrates that the restriction of pitch variation does not affect the perception of vocal emotions.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Does restriction of pitch variation affect the perception of vocal emotions in Mandarin Chinese?

Wang

Lee

2014

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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“…All materials for English, German, and Arabic were taken from a perceptually-validated stimulus inventory (Pell et al 2005(Pell et al , 2009. Stimuli for Spanish were constructed in a comparable manner for the purpose of this investigation.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recognizing Emotions in a Foreign Language

et al. 2009

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Expressions of basic emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) can be recognized pan-culturally from the face and it is assumed that these emotions can be recognized from a speaker's voice, regardless of an individual's culture or linguistic ability. Here, we compared how monolingual speakers of Argentine Spanish recognize basic emotions from pseudo-utterances (''nonsense speech'') produced in their native language and in three foreign languages (English, German, Arabic). Results indicated that vocal expressions of basic emotions could be decoded in each language condition at accuracy levels exceeding chance, although Spanish listeners performed significantly better overall in their native language (''in-group advantage''). Our findings argue that the ability to understand vocally-expressed emotions in speech is partly independent of linguistic ability and involves universal principles, although this ability is also shaped by linguistic and cultural variables.

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“…The parallelism of human emotion expression in speech and music has been demonstrated by a comprehensive review of empirical studies on patterns of acoustic parameters in these two forms of human affect communication (Juslin and Laukka, 2003). The assumption of powerful "affect primitives" in speech and language is also supported by research on the recognition of emotion in speech (Bryant and Barrett, 2008;Laukka et al, 2013b;Pell et al, 2009;Sauter et al, 2010;Scherer et al, 2001) and music (Laukka et al, 2013a). This research has generally shown the existence of both a fairly high degree of universality of the underlying expression and recognition mechanisms and of sizeable differences between cultures, especially for self-reflective, social, and moral emotions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Comparing the acoustic expression of emotion in the speaking and the singing voice

Scherer

Sundberg

Tamarit

et al. 2015

Computer Speech & Language

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We examine the similarities and differences in the expression of emotion in the singing and the speaking voice. Three internationally renowned opera singers produced "vocalises" (using a schwa vowel) and short nonsense phrases in different interpretations for 10 emotions. Acoustic analyses of emotional expression in the singing samples show significant differences between the emotions. In addition to the obvious effects of loudness and tempo, spectral balance and perturbation make significant contributions (high effect sizes) to this differentiation. A comparison of the emotion-specific patterns produced by the singers in this study with published data for professional actors portraying different emotions in speech generally show a very high degree of similarity. However, singers tend to rely more than actors on the use of voice perturbation, specifically vibrato, in particular in the case of high arousal emotions. It is suggested that this may be due to by the restrictions and constraints imposed by the musical structure.

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Factors in the recognition of vocally expressed emotions: A comparison of four languages

Cited by 291 publications

References 60 publications

Does restriction of pitch variation affect the perception of vocal emotions in Mandarin Chinese?

Does restriction of pitch variation affect the perception of vocal emotions in Mandarin Chinese?

Recognizing Emotions in a Foreign Language

Comparing the acoustic expression of emotion in the speaking and the singing voice

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