Vocal communication of emotion: A review of research paradigms

This study assessed young children's understanding of the effects of emotional and physiological states on cognitive performance. Five, 6-, 7-year-olds, and adults (N= 96) predicted and explained how children experiencing a variety of physiological and emotional states would perform on academic tasks. Scenarios included: (a) negative and positive emotions, (b) negative and positive physiological states, and (c) control conditions. All age groups understood the impairing effects of negative emotions and physiological states. Only 7-year-olds, however, showed adult-like reasoning about the potential enhancing effects of positive internal states and routinely cited cognitive mechanisms to explain how internal states affect performance. These results shed light on theory-of-mind development and also have significance for children's everyday school success.

Little is known about the influence of vocal emotions on speech understanding. Word recognition accuracy for stimuli spoken to portray seven emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, neutral, happiness, and pleasant surprise) was tested in younger and older listeners. Emotions were presented in either mixed (heterogeneous emotions mixed in a list) or blocked (homogeneous emotion blocked in a list) conditions. Three main hypotheses were tested. First, vocal emotion affects word recognition accuracy; specifically, portrayals of fear enhance word recognition accuracy because listeners orient to threatening information and/or distinctive acoustical cues such as high pitch mean and variation. Second, older listeners recognize words less accurately than younger listeners, but the effects of different emotions on intelligibility are similar across age groups. Third, blocking emotions in list results in better word recognition accuracy, especially for older listeners, and reduces the effect of emotion on intelligibility because as listeners develop expectations about vocal emotion, the allocation of processing resources can shift from emotional to lexical processing. Emotion was the within-subjects variable: all participants heard speech stimuli consisting of a carrier phrase followed by a target word spoken by either a younger or an older talker, with an equal number of stimuli portraying each of seven vocal emotions. The speech was presented in multi-talker babble at signal to noise ratios adjusted for each talker and each listener age group. Listener age (younger, older), condition (mixed, blocked), and talker (younger, older) were the main between-subjects variables. Fifty-six students (Mage= 18.3 years) were recruited from an undergraduate psychology course; 56 older adults (Mage= 72.3 years) were recruited from a volunteer pool. All participants had clinically normal pure-tone audiometric thresholds at frequencies ≤3000 Hz. There were significant main effects of emotion, listener age group, and condition on the accuracy of word recognition in noise. Stimuli spoken in a fearful voice were the most intelligible, while those spoken in a sad voice were the least intelligible. Overall, word recognition accuracy was poorer for older than younger adults, but there was no main effect of talker, and the pattern of the effects of different emotions on intelligibility did not differ significantly across age groups. Acoustical analyses helped elucidate the effect of emotion and some intertalker differences. Finally, all participants performed better when emotions were blocked. For both groups, performance improved over repeated presentations of each emotion in both blocked and mixed conditions. These results are the first to demonstrate a relationship between vocal emotion and word recognition accuracy in noise for younger and older listeners. In particular, the enhancement of intelligibility by emotion is greatest for words spoken to portray fear and presented heterogeneously with other emotions. Fear may have a specialized role in orienting attention to words heard in noise. This finding may be an auditory counterpart to the enhanced detection of threat information in visual displays. The effect of vocal emotion on word recognition accuracy is preserved in older listeners with good audiograms and both age groups benefit from blocking and the repetition of emotions.

A large literature in behavioral science suggests that people’s emotional condition can have an impact on their choices. We consider how people’s emotions affect their stated preferences and willingness to pay for changes in environmental quality, focusing on the effects of incidental emotions. We use videos to induce emotional states and test the replicability of the results reported in Hanley et al. (2017). Additionally, we employ Face Reader software to verify whether the intended emotional states were successfully induced in our experimental treatments. We find that our treatments succeed in implementing the predicted emotional condition in terms of self-reported emotions, but had a variable effect on measured (estimated) emotional states. We replicate the key result from Hanley et al. (2017): induced emotional state has no significant effect on stated preference estimates or on willingness to pay for environmental quality changes. Moreover, we confirm that, irrespective of the treatment assignment or emotional state - be it self reported or measured - we observe no significant effect of emotion on stated preferences. We conclude that stated preference estimates for environmental change are unaffected by changes in incidental emotions, and that preference estimates are robust to the emotional state of the responder.

Social relationships are constructed by and through the relational communication that people exchange. Relational messages are implicit nonverbal and verbal messages that signal how people regard one another and define their interpersonal relationships—equal or unequal, affectionate or hostile, inclusive or exclusive, similar or dissimilar, and so forth. Such signals can be measured automatically by the latest machine learning software tools and combined into meaningful factors that represent the socioemotional expressions that constitute relational messages between people. Relational messages operate continuously on a parallel track with verbal communication, implicitly telling interactants the current state of their relationship and how to interpret the verbal messages being exchanged. We report an investigation that explored how group members signal these implicit messages through multimodal behaviors measured by sensor data and linked to the socioemotional cognitions interpreted as relational messages. By use of a modified Brunswikian lens model, we predicted perceived relational messages of dominance, affection, involvement, composure, similarity and trust from automatically measured kinesic, vocalic and linguistic indicators. The relational messages in turn predicted the veracity of group members. The Brunswikian Lens Model offers a way to connect objective behaviors exhibited by social actors to the emotions and cognitions being perceived by other interactants and linking those perceptions to social outcomes. This method can be used to ascertain what behaviors and/or perceptions are associated with judgments of an actor’s veracity. Computerized measurements of behaviors and perceptions can replace manual measurements, significantly expediting analysis and drilling down to micro-level measurement in a previously unavailable manner.

Emotion and time pressure are two important factors affecting risk decision-making. This study explored the interaction of emotion and time pressure on risk decision-making by adopting 3 (emotion state: positive emotion, negative emotion, and control group) × 2 (time constraint: high time constraint and no time constraint) between-subject experiment design. The results showed that (1) both emotion and time pressure exerted significant effect on risk decision-making (generally, positive emotion renders participants more risk prone than negative emotion, and high time pressure promotes people more risk seeking than no time pressure); (2) time pressure polarized the effects of different emotions on risk decision-making. As effects of emotions were polarized under high time pressure, two distinct cognitive pathways may function in human decision-making. Based on our experimental result and previous neuroeconomic works, we proposed a novel dual cognitive pathways model to explain phenomenon in the current article.

Within the framework of the current gender research this dissertation focuses on applying a joint model and a corresponding method suited for integrating the many dispersed empirical studies on doing and viewing aspects of gender. An application of Brunswik’s lens-model (Brunswik, 1956) to communication research provides the basis for the development of a and perception-method that allows for an assessment of gender construction on a concrete and observation-based cue level. Additionally, this research contributes to the investigation of one of the most important applied questions of high societal relevance in gender research: why are there such few women in organizational leadership positions despite their high amount of professional qualification? A communication perspective to approach this question was chosen, focusing on verbal and nonverbal communication in task-oriented small groups. The research provides an overview of theoretical approaches within social psychology, a review of empirical literature, and a description of a series of six studies (N=391), conducted to approach the applied question and to test the new method of assessing gender construction processes. The research demonstrates the power of expectations over behavioral evidence of identical performance information (constructive effects). Results depended on the gender hypothesis and on real gender but also on the sex of the participant, sympathy, and other factors. In fact, gender hypothesis explained but a small amount of the variance of the overall findings and the magnitude of gender effects was generally small. Results of verbal and nonverbal cue analyses indicated that participants used semiotic cues differently, depending on their own gender, their gender-hypothesis and the concept in question. For example, in Study 1 women used more syntactic cues and men more pragmatic cues, while both used the same amount of semantic cues to infer gender of their chat mates. However, syntactic cues had the highest predictive value, followed by pragmatic cues, whereas semantic cues left participants at chance level of guessing gender correctly. In sum, cue analysis shed more light on communicative processes than the mere use of rating scales. Taken together, the research provides a useful framework and theory-based methodology for current empirical work, applying Brunswik’s lens model to gender communication research. The novelty of the empirical work lies in (a) the application of the performance and perception method in a CMC context, (b) the outline of and investigation into the new concept of evaluative affect display as a general indicator of approval or disapproval, and a specific indicator of prejudice toward female leaders, in small task-oriented groups, and (c) the use of dynamic interactional material within the Goldberg-paradigm, making the perceptual situation more realistic than by just using the previously employed written text materials. Both, gender-assumption and real gender of leaders had cognitive, expectational, and behavioral implications, but were not the only factors influencing performance and perception processes. Thus, gender construction processes are a highly context-sensitive phenomenon dependent on attributes of the perceiver, the target, and the respective degree of gender salience in a given situation. Applying Brunswik's lens-model to gender communication research generated a new method which allows to more specifically assess behavioral cues implied in gender communication.

Previous studies investigating the relationships between emotional state and creativity reveal inconsistent and inconclusive results. Some found that positive emotional state enhanced creativity performance; some supported the facilitative effect of negative emotions; while others showed that positive and negative emotional states can both improve creativity. These inconsistencies might be attributed to the problems that the lack of differentiation between levels of emotional states and no distinction is made between different types of creativity tasks in the previous studies. According to achievement motivation theory, optimal arousal level is a U-shaped function of the nature of performance task, and different tasks require different levels of arousal for optimal performance. Past research also indicated that different creativity tasks, says, open-ended divergent thinking and closed-ended insight problem solving, involved distinct processes. In the present study, 200 participants were randomly assigned to five emotional manipulation conditions-high degree of positive emotion, medium degree of positive emotion, neutral, medium degree of negative emotion, and high degree of negative emotion. Half of the participants in each condition performed divergent thinking test, while the other half performed insight problem-solving task. The Results showed that different emotional states have different effects on the two creativity measures. While medium positive emotional state can mostly improve insight problem solving, divergent thinking performance is positively related to the degree of arousal-regardless of positive or negative valence, -the higher the emotional arousal, the more enhanced the performance. These Results help to clarify the relationships between emotion and creativity. Results also establish the basis to explore the mechanism by which emotions influence creativity and the means by which creativity can be enhanced.

Several strategies have evolved in the vertebrate lineage to facilitate signal transmission in vocal communication. Here, I present a mechanism to facilitate signal transmission in a group of communicating common squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus sciureus). Vocal onsets of a conspecific affect call initiation in all other members of the group in less than 100ms. The probability of vocal onsets in a range of 100ms after the beginning of a vocalization of another monkey was significantly decreased compared to the mean probability of call onsets. Additionally, the probability for vocal onsets of conspecifics was significantly increased just a few hundreds of milliseconds after call onset of others. These behavioral data suggest neural mechanisms that suppress vocal output just after the onset of environmental noise, such as vocalizations of conspecifics, and increase the probability of call initiation of group mates shortly after. These findings add new audio-vocal behaviors to the known strategies that modulate signal transmission in vocal communication. The present study will guide future neurobiological studies that explore how the observed audio-vocal behaviors are implemented in the monkey brain.

Individual emotions are essential driving forces in strategic decision-making. Nevertheless, the current state of research on emotions and their effects on strategic decision-making is fragmented and inconsistent. Therefore, this paper presents a narrative literature review that aims to bring some structure into current research and to advance an agenda for a future research on emotions in the strategic decision-making context. Based on cognitive appraisal theory and affective events theory this review focuses on organizational and individual antecedents for the development of emotions in the strategic decision-making context as well as on the effects of emotions on the strategic decision-making process. The paper concludes with a conceptual framework that summarizes the findings of this review and indicates possible directions for future research.

Prospect theory has developed into a dominant and widely accepted model to describe risky decision making. Across several research fields, findings regarding emotion’s effect on risky decision making have supported the importance of emotions in the context of this model. However, those findings regarding deviating risk preferences and decision-making behavior have not yet been included in prospect theory and the current state of research is still fragmented and partly contradictory. Therefore, this paper presents a narrative literature review on the effect of emotion on prospect theory’s predictions for risky decision making. The results are discussed according to the type of emotion and their respective effect on prospect theory’s value function and probability weighting function. By comparing the findings with existing conceptual contributions in this field, this review aims to demonstrate the necessity of a more comprehensive view on emotion’s effect on risky decision making and to point out the missing elements, therefore providing indications for potential future directions.

Previous tests of emotion congruence in perception have failed to find that stimulus events in the visual field that match an individual's emotional state are perceived more efficiently than other stimuli. The present research examined unidimensional (valence) congruence and multidimensional (categorical) emotion congruence in perception. The former hypothesis, which has guided most past work on this problem, holds that stimuli that match the valence of the perceiver's emotional state will be perceived more efficiently than other stimuli. The latter hypothesis states that stimuli that match the perceiver's emotional state in a more specific way will be perceived more efficiently than other stimuli. In two experiments, subjects were induced to feel happy or sad and then performed a lexical decision task. In both experiments, emotions facilitated lexical decision about words specifically related to subjects' emotional states. Effects of emotion on perception of valence-congruent stimuli were not observed.

The neurobiological investigation of the avian song system has largely focused on the unique neural features of vocal control systems that contribute to learned motor patterns in songbirds. The role of emotion has been disregarded in developing a theory of song learning and performance. Here we review emerging evidence in support of Darwin's observation that vocal communication is emotional expression. We propose that neural pathways mediating emotional state remained integrated with the vocal control system as forebrain vocal control pathways evolved to support learned communication patterns. Vocalizations are therefore both a motor component of an emotional state and can influence emotional state via sensory feedback during vocal production. By acknowledging the importance of emotion in vocal communication, we are proposing that the song system and limbic brain are functionally linked in the production and reception of song.

Effect of emotion on galvanic skin response and vehicle control data during simulated driving

BackgroundWhereas sleep and emotion are important factors affecting false memory, there is a lack of empirical research on the interaction effect of sleep and emotion on false memory. Moreover, it should be investigated further that how the effects of emotion on false memory varies from presenting emotional content to eliciting emotional state.ObjectiveTo examine how sleep and varying emotional context influence false memories. We predicted that sleep and emotion would interactively affect false memory when participants are presented with negative words in a learning session (Experiment 1) or when their emotional state is induced before a learning session (Experiment 2).DesignWe used the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task. Emotional words were used to elicit emotion during learning in Experiment 1 and video clips were used to induce a particular mood state before learning in Experiment 2. Participants were divided into a “sleep group” and a “wake group” and completed an initial learning session either in the evening or in the morning respectively. After a learning session, participants in the sleep group slept at night as usual and completed a recognition test in the morning, while participants in the wake group stayed awake during the daytime and completed their recognition test in the evening. All participants completed a recognition test after the same period of time.ResultsIn Experiment 1, the wake group falsely recognized more negative critical lure words than neutral ones, but no such difference existed in the sleep group, suggesting that sleep modulated the emotional effect on false memory. In Experiment 2, participants in either a positive or negative mood state showed more false recognition than those in a neutral state. There was no such difference in the wake group. We conclude that sleep and emotion interactively affect false memory.

A growing body of evidence suggests that emotional states under which individuals perform decision-making tasks modulate performance. Studies have mainly reported that negative emotions can differentially increase or decrease performance by modulating feedback processing. In contrast, differential influences of specific emotions inside positive valence have been poorly investigated. The objective of the present work was to assess specific effect of different types of positive emotions on decision-making and to investigate whether this effect also depends on feedback processing. In our study, after being induced to feel either hope or happiness, participants undertook a risky sequential decision-making task in which feedback was required to obtain a good performance. We found that the more positive was the feedback received, the more happiness led participants to make risky decisions. This tendency was not observed among participants in the hopeful or in the control condition. Our results contribute to the literature showing that the effects of emotions on sequential decision-making performance can be explained by feedback processing and are not solely due to the valence of the emotional state. They also suggest that further research is required to determine which potential specific dimension is involved in the effects of positive emotions on sequential decision-making.