Abstract
Emotive speech is a social act in which a speaker displays emotional signals with a specific intention; in the case of third-party complaints, this intention is to elicit empathy in the listener. The present study assessed how the emotivity of complaints was perceived in various conditions. Participants listened to short statements describing painful or neutral situations, spoken with a complaining or neutral prosody, and evaluated how complaining the speaker sounded. In addition to manipulating features of the message, social-affiliative factors which could influence complaint perception were varied by adopting a cross-cultural design: participants were either Québécois (French Canadian) or French and listened to utterances expressed by both cultural groups. The presence of a complaining tone of voice had the largest effect on participant evaluations, while the nature of statements had a significant, but smaller influence. Marginal effects of culture on explicit evaluation of complaints were found. A multiple mediation analysis suggested that mean fundamental frequency was the main prosodic signal that participants relied on to detect complaints, though most of the prosody effect could not be linearly explained by acoustic parameters. These results highlight a tacit agreement between speaker and listener: what characterizes a complaint is how it is said (i.e., the tone of voice), more than what it is about or who produces it. More generally, the study emphasizes the central importance of prosody in expressive speech acts such as complaints, which are designed to strengthen social bonds and supportive responses in interactive behavior. This intentional and interpersonal aspect in the communication of emotions needs to be further considered in research on affect and communication.
Highlights
While the role of the voice in social interaction has been receiving growing interest over the last decades, literature on the topic has been scattered across research fields
The present study focuses on measures of pitch, voice quality, and rhythm known to be perceptually relevant in complaint production (Acuña-Ferreira, 2002; Rao, 2013) and other related modes of emotional expression (Laukka et al, 2016; Raine et al, 2019)
Our results provide experimental evidence supporting the literature on complaints, emotive communication, and vocal affect
Summary
While the role of the voice in social interaction has been receiving growing interest over the last decades, literature on the topic has been scattered across research fields. Experimental psychology has been focusing on affective speech and emotions (Frick, 1985; Scherer, 2003; Juslin, 2013); on the other hand, intentionality, speech acts, and attitudes have been mostly addressed by pragmatics and theoretical linguistics (Searle, 1965; Grice, 1989; Wichmann, 2002; Culpeper and Terkourafi, 2017). A large part of our daily social interactions is inherently emotive, relying on the attitudinal, intentional use of emotional signals (Caffi and Janney, 1994). These interactions, involving both speaker and listener in a complex collaborative timeline, remain poorly understood. Focusing on the case of complaints, the present study examines how emotivity is conveyed through speech, and how affective signals in the voice are processed in different social and cultural contexts
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