Emotion appraisal dimensions inferred from vocal expressions are consistent across cultures: a comparison between Australia and India.

Henrik Nordström,Petri Laukka,Hillary Anger Elfenbein,Emery Schubert,Nutankumar S Thingujam

doi:10.1098/rsos.170912

Abstract

This study explored the perception of emotion appraisal dimensions on the basis of speech prosody in a cross-cultural setting. Professional actors from Australia and India vocally portrayed different emotions (anger, fear, happiness, pride, relief, sadness, serenity and shame) by enacting emotion-eliciting situations. In a balanced design, participants from Australia and India then inferred aspects of the emotion-eliciting situation from the vocal expressions, described in terms of appraisal dimensions (novelty, intrinsic pleasantness, goal conduciveness, urgency, power and norm compatibility). Bayesian analyses showed that the perceived appraisal profiles for the vocally expressed emotions were generally consistent with predictions based on appraisal theories. Few group differences emerged, which suggests that the perceived appraisal profiles are largely universal. However, some differences between Australian and Indian participants were also evident, mainly for ratings of norm compatibility. The appraisal ratings were further correlated with a variety of acoustic measures in exploratory analyses, and inspection of the acoustic profiles suggested similarity across groups. In summary, results showed that listeners may infer several aspects of emotion-eliciting situations from the non-verbal aspects of a speaker's voice. These appraisal inferences also seem to be relatively independent of the cultural background of the listener and the speaker.

Highlights

The human voice is a versatile channel for emotional communication
Emotion categories can be well recognized across cultural groups, results from cross-cultural studies often report evidence for in-group advantage, to the effect that emotion recognition is more accurate when speakers and perceivers come from the same culture versus from different cultures (e.g. [5,6,7,8])
We focus on the associations that showed the largest effects (r > approx. 0.30) to assess the cross-cultural consistency of the acoustical correlates of appraisal dimensions and summarize the major trends below

Summary

Introduction

Whenever we hear an individual speak, we do process the meaning of the words that are used, and draw inferences based on the non-verbal aspects of the individual’s voice. These inferences are not restricted to emotion categories such as ‘happy’ and ‘sad’, but can include aspects of the situation that elicited the emotion [1]. Emotion categories can be well recognized across cultural groups, results from cross-cultural studies often report evidence for in-group advantage, to the effect that emotion recognition is more accurate when speakers and perceivers come from the same culture versus from different cultures It has been proposed that in-group advantage results from a greater match between expression and perception styles in conditions where speakers and perceivers are sampled from the same cultural group [9,10]

Methods

Results

Conclusion