The EU-Emotion Voice Database

Amandine Lassalle,Shimrit Fridenson-Hayo,Sven Bölte,Daniel Lundqvist,Delia Pigat,Anna Råde,Ofer Golan,Steve Berggen,Sigrid Elfström,Simon Baron-Cohen,Helen O’Reilly,Shahar Tal

doi:10.3758/s13428-018-1048-1

Abstract

In this study, we report the validation results of the EU-Emotion Voice Database, an emotional voice database available for scientific use, containing a total of 2,159 validated emotional voice stimuli. The EU-Emotion voice stimuli consist of audio-recordings of 54 actors, each uttering sentences with the intention of conveying 20 different emotional states (plus neutral). The database is organized in three separate emotional voice stimulus sets in three different languages (British English, Swedish, and Hebrew). These three sets were independently validated by large pools of participants in the UK, Sweden, and Israel. Participants’ validation of the stimuli included emotion categorization accuracy and ratings of emotional valence, intensity, and arousal. Here we report the validation results for the emotional voice stimuli from each site and provide validation data to download as a supplement, so as to make these data available to the scientific community. The EU-Emotion Voice Database is part of the EU-Emotion Stimulus Set, which in addition contains stimuli of emotions expressed in the visual modality (by facial expression, body language, and social scene) and is freely available to use for academic research purposes.

Highlights

The tone of voice, or prosody, of others is an important cue to understand their affective states
An overview of the CCRs and emotional rating scores can be found in Table 3 for each emotion and each intensity level
The overall recognition scores for the emotional voice stimuli sets we found were lower than the overall recognition scores reported by some previous emotional voice databases using sentences

Summary

Background

The tone of voice, or prosody, of others is an important cue to understand their affective states. We report the production and validation of the EU-Emotion Voice Database, a unique and large set of emotional vocal stimuli that were used as training material for the activities aimed at helping children with autism recognize and express emotions in the vocal modality. We used the EU-Emotion Voice Database to provide a pool of validated emotional voice stimuli for a psychology experiment investigating differences in emotional prosody recognition between children with and without autism in the UK, Sweden, and Israel (Fridenson-Hayo et al, 2016). The EU-Emotion Voice Database is a large and unique pool of stimuli in its own right, it is part of a larger emotional stimulus database, the EU-Emotion Stimulus Set.1 This includes emotional stimuli expressed in the visual modality (facial expressions, body language, and social scenes; see O’Reilly et al, 2016). One previous database has contained both audio and visual emotional stimuli (Bänziger et al, 2012), but it does not include social-scene stimuli that provide the contextual cues that are potentially important to recognize certain complex emotions

Method

37 Male B

Participants

Result and discussion

Findings

Discussion