Relationship of Prosody Perception to Personality and Aggression

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

“…Personality traits are associated with affective biases in emotion judgments (Rusting, 1998) due to the interaction of personality with attention, motivation and mood (Edgar et al, 2012): there is evidence that Extraversion and Agreeableness predispose people to perceive positive affect in emotional stimuli, whereas Neuroticism (low Emotional Stability) is associated with sensitivity to negative emotional stimuli (Knyazev et al, 2008), and may be instantiated at a neural level (Brück et al, 2011). These affective biases have been found for discrete, summative judgments of emotion in music (Vuoskoski and Eerola, 2011; Taruffi et al, 2017) and in speech prosody (Burton et al, 2013), but it is unknown whether they influence moment-by-moment judgments of emotion.…”

Exploring the Effects of Personality Traits on the Perception of Emotions From Prosody

“…However, it should be noted that previous findings are also only partially in line with the trait-congruency predictions. For instance, Scherer and Scherer (2011) and Burton et al (2013) suggest that extraverted individuals are better at vocal emotion recognition overall, but the latter study only finds this effect for males. Moreover, Scherer and Scherer (2011) argued that neuroticism links to better overall recognition of vocal emotions, while Burton et al (2013) and other studies failed to find this relationship (Cunningham, 1977; Terracciano et al, 2003; Banziger et al, 2009).…”

“…Our findings are in line with previous studies that also failed to find a significant relationship between emotion perception and personality traits (e.g., Elfenbein et al, 2007; Banziger et al, 2009). Although there are more studies reporting a significant relationship (e.g., Cunningham, 1977; Scherer and Scherer, 2011; Burton et al, 2013) than studies reporting no relationship, it still raises the question of why replicating results is not guaranteed. One possibility, of course, is that samples are not comparable across studies.…”

“…Both the vocal and facial emotion recognition literature has explored the relationship between different personality traits and emotion recognition accuracy (although far more emphasis has been put on detecting emotions from faces). For instance, in the vocal emotion literature, extraversion and conscientiousness have been associated with better vocal emotion recognition, but only in males (Burton et al, 2013). In contrast, Terracciano et al (2003) found a positive relationship between vocal emotion perception and openness to experience.…”

“…For instance, different studies have used different personality inventories and varying emotion recognition measures. While some studies correlate personality traits against overall emotion recognition accuracy (Terracciano et al, 2003; Elfenbein et al, 2007; Burton et al, 2013), some studies have investigated the relationship between personality traits and recognition of specific emotions (e.g., Matsumoto et al, 2000). Further, some studies have relied on specific individual personality traits, such as extraversion and neuroticism alone (e.g., Cunningham, 1977; Scherer and Scherer, 2011), whereas other studies have included all Big Five (i.e., agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience) personality dimensions (e.g., Matsumoto et al, 2000; Rubin et al, 2005).…”