Results for Italian Participants

Abstract

This chapter reports the results of perceptual experiments involving Italian 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. In order to investigate the effects of the communication channels on the emotional decoding process, the stimuli are portrayed through the visual, auditory, and the audiovisual mode. The main goal was to investigate whether, for Italian subjects, the visual channel is more effective than the auditory one to infer emotional information and if this effectiveness is affected by the cultural context and in particular by the language. Results show that the audio and visual components of emotional messages convey much the same amount of information either separately or in combination, suggesting that emotional information is not added over the amount of cues provided. In addition, Italian subjects favor vocal information while decoding vocal emotional information in their native language and visual information in the non-native cultural context, supporting the hypothesis that emotional communication is affected by culture and language. Finally, among the basic emotions considered, anger got the higher decoding accuracy.