Measurements as the basis for interpreting the content of emotionally coloured acoustic signals

Abstract

Nowadays, there has come to life a growing demand of society for obtaining objective quantitative evaluations in psychology, biology, neurophysiology, and other fields that did not concern metrology before. Such evaluations should meet measurement requirements. The measurement of emotions associated with acoustic signals is a typical example. On the strength of emotion evolution, the authors, for the first time, propose the definition of emotions as measurable multidimensional quantities and a measurement scale that includes 8 basic emotions. A measurement model is justified. It enables identifying mammal basic emotions by the evaluation of the infrasound spectrum in the zone of 3 brain biorhythms after a non-linear conversion of the acoustic signals and by the determination of the frequency zone with the maximum signal energy. The sources of measurement uncertainty, experimental results related to various animals as well as prospects for further research and development are given and discussed.