The voice conveys emotion in ten globalized cultures and one remote village in Bhutan.

Abstract

With data from 10 different globalized cultures and 1 remote, isolated village in Bhutan, we examined universals and cultural variations in the recognition of 16 nonverbal emotional vocalizations. College students in 10 nations (Study 1) and villagers in remote Bhutan (Study 2) were asked to match emotional vocalizations to 1-sentence stories of the same valence. Guided by previous conceptualizations of recognition accuracy, across both studies, 7 of the 16 vocal burst stimuli were found to have strong or very strong recognition in all 11 cultures, 6 vocal bursts were found to have moderate recognition, and 4 were not universally recognized. All vocal burst stimuli varied significantly in terms of the degree to which they were recognized across the 11 cultures. Our discussion focuses on the implications of these results for current debates concerning the emotion conveyed in the voice.

Emotion Perception from Face, Voice, and Touch: Comparisons and Convergence

“…Although emotion recognition can be fairly accurate when listeners chose from a limited set of emotion categories, agreement drops significantly as more categories become available. Moreover, fewer emotions can be perceived from the voice than from the face [12]. …”

Toward a Social Psychophysics of Face Communication

“…To support these complex social interactions, humans are equipped with a powerful tool-the face (although see also research on voice and body posture, e.g., Atkinson et al 2004, Belin et al 2008, Cordaro et al 2015, Dael et al 2012, de Gelder 2009, Grezes et al 2007, Pollick et al 2001, Roether et al 2009, Scheiner & Fischer 2011. As a rich source of information, the human face can elicit myriad immediate social judgments-for example, about identity (e.g., Gauthier et al 1999, pattern of a happy facial expression is transmitted through the medium of light (i.e., photons) to the visual system of another human.…”

Revisiting diversity: cultural variation reveals the constructed nature of emotion perception

“…In the last decade [7–9], and at an accelerated pace in the last few years [10–16], several research groups have revisited the assumption that emotional expressions are universally perceived. These tests are a critical and timely endeavor in the face of many shifting sociodemographic factors across the globe (e.g., from rural to urban, from culturally isolated to interconnected, from subsistence agriculture to commerce, and so on), that are serving to produce profound cultural changes [17].…”

“…These experiments were conducted to test whether an expanded cadre of facial expressions [7,16] and vocalizations [9,10] can also be considered universal cues to emotional states such as pride and awe. These studies have used choice-from-array tasks (Figure 1), akin to those used by Ekman and colleagues in their classic work, and have found evidence consistent with universality, although not as robustly as in Ekman’s classic work.…”