Results for French Participants

Abstract

This chapter reports the results of perceptual experiments that involved French subjects assessing 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 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. The results reveal that French subjects better identify emotions through visual than through vocal information, the recognition accuracy does not increase when bimodal modality is exploited and language affects the recognition performance. In addition, among the basic emotions considered, anger is perceptually privileged because received the highest percentage of recognition accuracy.