Acoustic profiles of negative emotion

Abstract

A study was initiated to acoustically characterize and differentiate discrete categories of negatively valenced emotions conveyed through speech prosody. Utterances elicited from eight encoders (actors) in different emotional tones were perceptually rated by a group of decoders to gauge how strongly each token was associated with the basic emotions of ‘‘anger,’’ ‘‘disgust,’’ and ‘‘sadness’’ using a seven-choice response paradigm. Tokens rated as highly representative of each target emotion by greater than 80% of decoders were examined acoustically. Measures of fundamental frequency (mean, range, sd), amplitude (mean, range, sd), and duration (speech rate, %voiced) were obtained from each token and for utterances spoken in a ‘‘neutral’’ tone by the same encoders. Normalized measures were compared among emotional categories to uncover reliable acoustic dimensions that may have contributed to perceptually distinct vocal symbols of negative emotion states. Results pointed to important differences in duration, amplitude, and especially fundamental frequency in discriminating among prosodic signals representing distinct negative emotions. These findings extend work on the acoustic underpinnings of positive and negative vocalizations in speech [M. D. Pell, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 109, 1668–1680 (2001)], providing finer specification of these parameters within the family of ‘‘negative’’ emotions. [Work supported by NSERC.]