Abstract
Singing involves vocal production accompanied by a dynamic and meaningful use of facial expressions, which may serve as ancillary gestures that complement, disambiguate, or reinforce the acoustic signal. In this investigation, we examined the use of facial movements to communicate emotion, focusing on movements arising in three epochs: before vocalization (pre-production), during vocalization (production), and immediately after vocalization (post-production). The stimuli were recordings of seven vocalists' facial movements as they sang short (14 syllable) melodic phrases with the intention of communicating happiness, sadness, irritation, or no emotion. Facial movements were presented as point-light displays to 16 observers who judged the emotion conveyed. Experiment 1 revealed that the accuracy of emotional judgment varied with singer, emotion, and epoch. Accuracy was highest in the production epoch, however, happiness was well communicated in the pre-production epoch. In Experiment 2, observers judged point-light displays of exaggerated movements. The ratings suggested that the extent of facial and head movements was largely perceived as a gauge of emotional arousal. In Experiment 3, observers rated point-light displays of scrambled movements. Configural information was removed in these stimuli but velocity and acceleration were retained. Exaggerated scrambled movements were likely to be associated with happiness or irritation whereas unexaggerated scrambled movements were more likely to be identified as “neutral.” An analysis of singers' facial movements revealed systematic changes as a function of the emotional intentions of singers. The findings confirm the central role of facial expressions in vocal emotional communication, and highlight individual differences between singers in the amount and intelligibility of facial movements made before, during, and after vocalization.
Highlights
The findings of Experiment 1 showed that expressions of happiness and neutral were more likely to be perceived by viewers from point-light displays of singers’ facial features compared to expressions of irritation and sadness
Anger and sadness may be communicated in full-video (Dahl and Friberg, 2007), previous work using point-light displays (PLDs) has shown that the emotions of anger and sadness may not be as well communicated as happiness in PLDs (Bassili, 1979)
Happiness was more clearly decoded in the pre-production epoch than the production epoch. This is consistent with previous findings, suggesting that happiness is a difficult emotion to convey during singing because facial areas signaling happiness are being recruited (Scotto di Carlo and Guaitella, 2004)
Summary
Emotional communication has been investigated in many different modalities including facial expressions (Elfenbein and Ambady, 2002), tone of voice (Johnstone and Scherer, 2000), music (Juslin and Laukka, 2003; Gabrielsson and Lindström, 2010), and gestures associated with music performance (Davidson, 1993; Thompson et al, 2005; Vines et al, 2006). Perceivers are sensitive to the information contained in these channels of communication and can decode emotional signals produced by individuals within and across cultures (Russell et al, 2003; Thompson and Balkwill, 2010). Emotions are encoded in a range of acoustic attributes, including contour, modality, pitch height, intensity, tempo, and rhythm (for a review, see Juslin and Sloboda, 2010). Ensemble musicians use gestures and eye contact to facilitate coordinated action, in sections that introduce new or important material (Williamon and Davidson, 2002)
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