Vocal cues in emotion encoding and decoding

Scherer, Klaus R.; Banse, Rainer; Wallbott, Harald G.; Goldbeck, Thomas

doi:10.1007/bf00995674

Cited by 329 publications

(260 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…However, as noted by Scherer, Banse, Wallbott, and Goldbeck (1991), research on vocal expression ofemotion lags behind the study offacial affect expression, and this has resulted in vocal cues' being difficult to define and manipulate accurately. The recent in-…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceiving affect from the voice and the face

Massaro

Egan

1996

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

241

163

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This experiment examines how emotion is perceived by using facial and vocal cues of a speaker. Three levels of facial affect were presented using a computer-generated face. Three levels of vocal affect were obtained by recording the voice of a male amateur actor who spoke a semantically neutral word in different simulated emotional states. These two independent variables were presented to subjects in all possible permutations--visual cues alone, vocal cues alone, and visual and vocal cues together-which gave a total set of 15 stimuli. The subjects were asked to judge the emotion of the stimuli in a two-alternative forced choice task (either HAPPy or ANGRY). The results indicate that subjects evaluate and integrate information from both modalities to perceive emotion. The influence of one modality was greater to the extent that the other was ambiguous (neutral). The fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP)fit the judgments significantly better than an additive model, which weakens theories based on an additive combination of modalities, categorical perception, and influence from only a single modality.Research has shown that we use multiple sources of information when we comprehend speech (Massaro, 1987b(Massaro, , 1989Massaro & Cohen, 1990). Visual information from a speaker's face, for example, can strongly influence speech perception, especially when the auditory information is degraded: in one study, recognition of auditory sentences in noisy environments improved from 23% to 65% when the perceivers could also see the speaker's face (Summerfield, 1979). We also use multiple sources of information when we perceive a speaker's emotion. These sources include a variety ofparalinguistic signals, as well as the speech's verbal content. The emotion may be interpreted in different ways, depending on the voice quality, facial expression, and body language ofthe speaker. To study the degree to which paralinguistic sources of information are used, it is important that one first define these sources and then determine how they are evaluated and integrated. In the present study, in order to investigate the perception of a speaker's emotion, two sources of paralinguistic information were varied: facial expressions and vocal cues.Facial expressions are an effective means of communicating emotion. Darwin (1872) argued that facial expressions originate in basic acts of self-preservation common to human beings and other animals, and that these expressions are related to the emotional states that they convey. Research by Meltzoff and Moore (1977) suggests that we are biologically prepared from birth to respond to facial expressions. They produced evidence which showed that

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceiving affect from the voice and the face

Massaro

Egan

1996

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

241

163

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“…Based on another recent series of studies of five emotions fear, joy, sadness, anger, and disgust--using different types of listener groups, Scherer et ai. (32) reported a mean accuracy of 56%. In consequence--after correction for chance guessing and sampling error--the recognition of emotion from standardized voice samples, using actor portrayals, seems to lie at -50%, approximately four to five times higher than what would be expected by chance.…”

Section: Judging Emotional States From the Voicementioning

confidence: 99%

Expression of emotion in voice and music

1995

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Summary: Vocal communication of emotion is biologically adaptive for socially living species and has therefore evolved in a phylogenetically continuous manner. Human affect bursts or interjections can be considered close parallels to animal affect vocalizations. The development of speech, unique to the human species, has relied on the voice as a carrier signal, and thus emotion effects on the voice become audible during speech. This article reviews (a) the evidence on listeners' ability to accurately identify a speaker's emotion from voice cues alone, (b) the research efforts trying to isolate the acoustic features that determine listener judgments, and (c) the findings on actual acoustic concomitants of a speaker's emotional state (real or portrayed by actors). Finally, based on speculations about the joint origin of speech and vocal music in nonlinguistic affect vocalizations, similarities of emotion expression in speech and music are discussed.

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“…'', (2) ''fi gö tt laich jean kill gos terr''. Those meaningless ''sentences'' combine phonetic elements from various European languages and were constructed to sound like an unknown language for lay listeners with different linguistic backgrounds (Scherer et al, 1991). Compared to real sentences, the linguistic constraints on the pitch contours are obviously reduced in those utterances, which are deprived of a given syntactic and semantic structure.…”

Section: Verbal Contentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of intonation in emotional expressions

Bänziger

Scherer

2005

Speech Communication

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299

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The influence of emotions on intonation patterns (more specifically F0/pitch contours) is addressed in this article. A number of authors have claimed that specific intonation patterns reflect specific emotions, whereas others have found little evidence supporting this claim and argued that F0/pitch and other vocal aspects are continuously, rather than categorically, affected by emotions and/or emotional arousal. In this contribution, a new coding system for the assessment of F0 contours in emotion portrayals is presented. Results obtained for actor portrayed emotional expressions show that mean level and range of F0 in the contours vary strongly as a function of the degree of activation of the portrayed emotions. In contrast, there was comparatively little evidence for qualitatively different contour shapes for different emotions.

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Vocal cues in emotion encoding and decoding

Cited by 329 publications

References 22 publications

Perceiving affect from the voice and the face

Perceiving affect from the voice and the face

Expression of emotion in voice and music

The role of intonation in emotional expressions

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