Encoding Conditions Affect Recognition of Vocally Expressed Emotions Across Cultures

Rebecca Jürgens,Julia Fischer,Elisabeth Scheiner,Matthis Drolet,Ralph Pirow

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00111

Abstract

Although the expression of emotions in humans is considered to be largely universal, cultural effects contribute to both emotion expression and recognition. To disentangle the interplay between these factors, play-acted and authentic (non-instructed) vocal expressions of emotions were used, on the assumption that cultural effects may contribute differentially to the recognition of staged and spontaneous emotions. Speech tokens depicting four emotions (anger, sadness, joy, fear) were obtained from German radio archives and re-enacted by professional actors, and presented to 120 participants from Germany, Romania, and Indonesia. Participants in all three countries were poor at distinguishing between play-acted and spontaneous emotional utterances (58.73% correct on average with only marginal cultural differences). Nevertheless, authenticity influenced emotion recognition: across cultures, anger was recognized more accurately when play-acted (z = 15.06, p < 0.001) and sadness when authentic (z = 6.63, p < 0.001), replicating previous findings from German populations. German subjects revealed a slight advantage in recognizing emotions, indicating a moderate in-group advantage. There was no difference between Romanian and Indonesian subjects in the overall emotion recognition. Differential cultural effects became particularly apparent in terms of differential biases in emotion attribution. While all participants labeled play-acted expressions as anger more frequently than expected, German participants exhibited a further bias toward choosing anger for spontaneous stimuli. In contrast to the German sample, Romanian and Indonesian participants were biased toward choosing sadness. These results support the view that emotion recognition rests on a complex interaction of human universals and cultural specificities. Whether and in which way the observed biases are linked to cultural differences in self-construal remains an issue for further investigation.

Highlights

Emotions are an important part of human social life
In a series of previous studies we presented listeners with emotional speech tokens produced without external instruction (“authentic”) obtained from radio archives, as well as corresponding tokens re-enacted by professional actors (“play-acted”)
The analysis of ratings using choice theory revealed that participants had a strong bias toward choosing the response “authentic” in the authenticity ratings (Figure 2), which may explain the higher recognition accuracy for authentic speech tokens

Summary

Introduction

Emotions are an important part of human social life. They mediate between the internal state and external world and they prepare the organism for subsequent actions and interactions. Different theoretical frameworks have been put forward as to whether emotions are universal and evolved adaptations (Darwin, 1872) or whether they are socially constructed and vary across cultures (Averill, 1980). Both approaches are, not mutually exclusive, and it has recently been argued that the dichotomy between nature and nurture should be abandoned (Prinz, 2004; Juslin, 2012; Mason and Capitanio, 2012). Not mutually exclusive, and it has recently been argued that the dichotomy between nature and nurture should be abandoned (Prinz, 2004; Juslin, 2012; Mason and Capitanio, 2012). Matsumoto (1989), for example, argued that emotions are biologically programed, cultural factors have a strong influence on the control of emotional expression and perception

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