Results for American Participants

Abstract

This chapter reports the results of perceptual emotional experiments involving American subjects in the assessment of emotional stimuli extracted from Italian (as a country-specific language) and American English (as a global spread language) live recording movie scenes. The stimuli concern some of the basic emotions of happiness, fear, anger, surprise, sadness, as well as a language specific emotion such as sarcasm/irony, and are portrayed through the mute video, the audio alone, and the combined audio/video mode. The main goal was to investigate whether, for American subjects, the visual channel is more effective than the auditory one to infer emotional information and whether this effectiveness is affected by the cultural context and in particular by the language. Results show that American subjects are facilitated by the visual mode in the identification of emotional information, independently from the cultural context and language of the stimuli. Furthermore, the bimodal presentation (the audio/video combined modality) of emotional information did not improve significantly the recognition accuracy with respect to the mute video modality. The familiarity with the Italian culture and language seem to play a role in the recognition performance. Among the basic emotions considered, anger is perceptually privileged because received the highest percentage of recognition accuracy.