Vocal Emotion Perception Research Articles

Attending to the Sound of Feelings: An ERP Investigation of Vocal Emotion Perception Deficits in Traumatic Brain Injured Patients

Event Abstract Back to Event Attending to the Sound of Feelings: An ERP Investigation of Vocal Emotion Perception Deficits in Traumatic Brain Injured Patients Christopher Sufani1*, Jacqueline A. Rushby1 and Skye McDonald1 1 University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Australia Aims: Severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) may result in reduced sensitivity to vocal expressions of emotions. This deficit can negatively impact psycho-social adjustment and functioning post-injury. The present study utilized event-related potential analysis (ERP) to investigate whether perceptual or cognitive stages of vocal emotion perception (Schirmer & Kotz, 2006) are implicated following severe TBI. Method: Fifteen adults with severe TBI and 15 demographically-matched healthy control participants completed an emotional tone oddball task whilst electroencephalography (EEG) equipment recorded ERP amplitudes and peak-latency. In the oddball task, participants were told to detect and click in response to the rare presentation of emotional (i.e., happy, angry and disgusted) vocal expressions, embedded in a frequent series of distractors (i.e., neutral vocal expressions). Participants were then asked to label these vocal expression of emotions in a forced-choice identification task. Results: At early perceptual stages of processing (200ms), the TBI group showed a significant increase in N2 amplitudes to happy tones and a decrease in N2 amplitudes to angry and disgust tones. Similarly, at later cognitive stages of processing (400ms), the TBI group also showed an increase in N4 amplitudes to happy tones and a decrease in N4 amplitudes to angry tones. However, peak latency analysis revealed that the TBI group exhibited significantly attenuated ERPs at early and later stages of processing. Behaviour analysis confirmed that there was a general reduction in the detection and identification of emotional tones for the TBI group. Conclusion: Although the present ERP amplitude data indicated early and late deficits in vocal emotion perception, it was concluded that information processing speed - as evidenced by the attenuation of peak latencies - accounted for the reduced behavioural detection and identification of vocal expressions. References Schimer A., & Kotz, S. (2006). Beyond the right hemisphere: Brain mechanisms mediating vocal emotional processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 24-30. Keywords: TBI, vocal emotion perception, Prosody, Perception, ERPs (Event-Related Potentials) Conference: Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Inc, Coffs Harbour, Australia, 26 Nov - 28 Nov, 2014. Presentation Type: Oral Presentation Topic: Psychophysiology Citation: Sufani C, Rushby JA and McDonald S (2014). Attending to the Sound of Feelings: An ERP Investigation of Vocal Emotion Perception Deficits in Traumatic Brain Injured Patients. Conference Abstract: Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Inc. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2014.216.00006 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 15 Oct 2014; Published Online: 02 Dec 2014. * Correspondence: Mr. Christopher Sufani, University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia, christopher.sufani@gmail.com Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Christopher Sufani Jacqueline A Rushby Skye McDonald Google Christopher Sufani Jacqueline A Rushby Skye McDonald Google Scholar Christopher Sufani Jacqueline A Rushby Skye McDonald PubMed Christopher Sufani Jacqueline A Rushby Skye McDonald Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Adaptation aftereffects in vocal emotion perception elicited by expressive faces and voices.

The perception of emotions is often suggested to be multimodal in nature, and bimodal as compared to unimodal (auditory or visual) presentation of emotional stimuli can lead to superior emotion recognition. In previous studies, contrastive aftereffects in emotion perception caused by perceptual adaptation have been shown for faces and for auditory affective vocalization, when adaptors were of the same modality. By contrast, crossmodal aftereffects in the perception of emotional vocalizations have not been demonstrated yet. In three experiments we investigated the influence of emotional voice as well as dynamic facial video adaptors on the perception of emotion-ambiguous voices morphed on an angry-to-happy continuum. Contrastive aftereffects were found for unimodal (voice) adaptation conditions, in that test voices were perceived as happier after adaptation to angry voices, and vice versa. Bimodal (voice + dynamic face) adaptors tended to elicit larger contrastive aftereffects. Importantly, crossmodal (dynamic face) adaptors also elicited substantial aftereffects in male, but not in female participants. Our results (1) support the idea of contrastive processing of emotions (2), show for the first time crossmodal adaptation effects under certain conditions, consistent with the idea that emotion processing is multimodal in nature, and (3) suggest gender differences in the sensory integration of facial and vocal emotional stimuli.

Emotion in voice matters: Neural correlates of emotional prosody perception

The ability to perceive emotions is imperative for successful interpersonal functioning. The present study examined the neural characteristics of emotional prosody perception with an exploratory event-related potential analysis. Participants were 59 healthy individuals who completed a discrimination task presenting 120 semantically neutral word pairs from five prosody conditions (happy/happy, angry/angry, neutral/neutral, angry/happy, happy/angry). The task required participants to determine whether words in the pair were spoken in same or different emotional prosody. Reflective of an initial processing stage, the word 1 N1 component was found to have greatest amplitude in parietal regions of the hemispheres, and was largest for emotional compared to neutral stimuli, indicating detection of emotion features. A second processing stage, represented by word 1 P2, showed similar topographic effects; however, amplitude was largest for happy in the left hemisphere while angry was largest in the right, illustrating differentiation of emotions. At the third processing stage, word 1 N3 amplitude was largest in frontal regions, indicating later cognitive processing occurs in the frontal cortex. N3 was largest for happy, which had lowest accuracy compared to angry and neutral. The present results support Schirmer and Kotz's (2006) model of vocal emotion perception because they elucidated the function and ERP components by reflecting three primary stages of emotional prosody perception, controlling for semantic influence.

Preschoolers’ Perception of Vocal Emotion

Perception of a speaker's emotional state is based upon auditory as well as visual cues.Researchers mainly focused on studying emotions that conveyed by visual cues,such as facial expressions recognition research;however,the developmental trend of preschoolers' emotion understanding based on auditory cues was not very clear.Emotions of a speaker are carried in two vocal channels:prosody and semantic.To explore preschoolers' perceptive characteristics of vocal emotions,two experiments were conducted in view of prosody and semantic.In Experiment 1,124 participants aged from 3 to 5 years old(61 boys and 63 girls) were asked to judge five emotions(happiness,fear,anger,sadness and neutral) of a man and a woman from cues that conveyed by expressing neutrally semantic sentences in different prosody.Results indicated that the ability of identifying vocal emotions of anger,fear,and neutrality developed with age in preschool period.Happiness was the easiest emotion to be identified,while fear was the most difficult one.All participants scored higher in perceiving a woman's vocal cues than those of a man's.Experiment 2 was aimed at further examining which cue children would rely on to identify the emotion of the speaker if the prosody and semantic cues were contradictory(e.g.a happy event was expressed with sad prosody cue).Participants consisted of 129 children aged from 3 to 5 years old(66 boys and 63 girls).Results showed that all the participants were more inclined to focus on the prosody.It is important to understand the developmental trajectory of understanding vocal emotions in preschoolers.Finding out more about typical patterns of children's early emotion understanding abilities is beneficial for child education,especially for designing early interventions for atypical children,such as children with cochlear implants or hearing aids and with autism.

Detecting the sound of feelings: An ERP investigation of vocal emotion perception

Event Abstract Back to Event Detecting the sound of feelings: An ERP investigation of vocal emotion perception Christopher Sufani1*, Jacqueline A. Rushby1 and Skye McDonald1 1 University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Australia Aims: In speech, an individual’s tone of voice modulates systematically to signal their emotional state and intentions. Hence the accurate perception of tone in voice plays a critical role in everyday psychosocial functioning. Using an oddball paradigm, the current study investigated event-related potential (ERP) correlates of acoustic analysis (100ms), emotional salience detection (200 ms) and cognitive evaluation (300-500 ms) of emotional voices, as proposed by Schirmer & Kotz (2006). Method: In the oddball task, 34 undergraduate psychology students (18 females, 20.0 years old) were fitted with EEG caps and told to mouse-click in response to rare auditory presentation of emotionally vocalised words. Participants completed two blocks of the oddball task, each consisting of words spoken in neutral (300), happy (25), angry (25) and disgusted (25) tones. Behavioural, responses and peak-amplitudes differences to emotional tones at 100, 200, and 300-500 ms were analysed. Results: The task elicited P1 (50-150 ms), N2 (150-250 ms), P3 (250-350 ms) and N3 (300-45 0ms) components. Rare emotional tones in comparison to frequent neutral tones elicited greater P1, N2 and N3 peak-amplitudes. Moreover, both N2 and N3 components elicited greater peak-amplitudes at right central regions in response to negative (angry/disgust) compared to positive tones. P3 however, elicited greater P3 peak-amplitudes to neutral tones. Behaviourally, participants were significantly better at detecting negative tones with significantly faster response times to angry tones. Conclusions: Given the early (100-200 ms) peak-amplitude differences between neutral and emotional tones, the P1 and N2 components are likely reflect early acoustic analysis and emotional salience detection processes. Differences in the topographical distribution of N3 may reflect a distinction in the neural mechanisms underlying the cognitive evaluation of positively and negatively valence tones. P3 reflected inhibitory processes associated with the nature of the task. Keywords: vocal emotion perception, Event-related potentials, oddball paradigm, P1, N2, P3, N3 Conference: ASP2013 - 23rd Annual meeting of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Wollongong, Australia, 20 Nov - 22 Nov, 2013. Presentation Type: Oral Presentation Topic: Perception Citation: Sufani C, Rushby JA and McDonald S (2013). Detecting the sound of feelings: An ERP investigation of vocal emotion perception. Conference Abstract: ASP2013 - 23rd Annual meeting of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.213.00013 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 25 Oct 2013; Published Online: 05 Nov 2013. * Correspondence: Mr. Christopher Sufani, University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Sydney, Australia, christopher.sufani@gmail.com Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Christopher Sufani Jacqueline A Rushby Skye McDonald Google Christopher Sufani Jacqueline A Rushby Skye McDonald Google Scholar Christopher Sufani Jacqueline A Rushby Skye McDonald PubMed Christopher Sufani Jacqueline A Rushby Skye McDonald Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Impaired Emotional Prosody Processing in Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: An Event-Related Potential Study

Event Abstract Back to Event Impaired Emotional Prosody Processing in Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: An Event-Related Potential Study Jacqueline A. Rushby1*, Skye McDonald1, Francesca Froreich1, Alana Fisher1 and Jaimi Iredale1 1 University of New South Wales, Psychology, Australia Aims: Impaired communicative competence is well-documented among individuals with a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). These impairments may in part result from a reduced perception of paralinguistic cues, such as emotional prosody which help inform judgments about another’s emotional state. This study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the neural mechanisms of emotional prosody perception in TBI, within the framework of Schirmer and Kotz’s (2006) model of vocal emotion perception. Methods: Nineteen adults with severe TBI (15 male, age 46.1, education 12.5, average post-traumatic amnesia 66.78 days, average time post-injury 12.5 y), and 18 neurologically-healthy controls (11 males, age 43.9, education 15.4) completed a discrimination task which presented semantically-neutral word pairs from five prosody conditions (happy/happy, angry/angry, neutral/neutral, angry/happy, happy/angry); participants were required to judge the emotional prosody as the ‘same’ or ‘different’ whilst electroencephalogram and accuracy were recorded. Results: Preliminary analyses indicated that ERPs were larger in control compared with TBI participants, and were larger in central than lateral sites for both emotion categories compared with neutral, whereas the converse was found in TBI ,who showed a hemisphere > midline topography, but no topographical differentiation across frontal/posterior regions (F = 4.26, p = .046). This difference was also reflected in reduced accuracy for both emotion conditions for TBI group. Conclusions: TBI participants were not impaired in sensory processing of acoustic cues or recognition of emotional salience in acoustic cues. In regards to cognition and evaluative judgement however, TBI participants showed obvious differences in both ERP morphology, and behavioural outcomes, compared with controls. These findings are consistent with the frontal and posterior poles being more vulnerable to damage in TBI. Keywords: emotion, Prosody, ERP, Severe traumatic brain injury, Sensory Processing* Conference: ASP2013 - 23rd Annual meeting of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Wollongong, Australia, 20 Nov - 22 Nov, 2013. Presentation Type: Oral Presentation Topic: Emotion Citation: Rushby JA, McDonald S, Froreich F, Fisher A and Iredale J (2013). Impaired Emotional Prosody Processing in Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: An Event-Related Potential Study. Conference Abstract: ASP2013 - 23rd Annual meeting of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.213.00035 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 24 Oct 2013; Published Online: 05 Nov 2013. * Correspondence: Dr. Jacqueline A Rushby, University of New South Wales, Psychology, Randwick, NSW, 2031, Australia, j.rushby@unsw.edu.au Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Jacqueline A Rushby Skye McDonald Francesca Froreich Alana Fisher Jaimi Iredale Google Jacqueline A Rushby Skye McDonald Francesca Froreich Alana Fisher Jaimi Iredale Google Scholar Jacqueline A Rushby Skye McDonald Francesca Froreich Alana Fisher Jaimi Iredale PubMed Jacqueline A Rushby Skye McDonald Francesca Froreich Alana Fisher Jaimi Iredale Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

An ERP study of vocal emotion processing in asymmetric Parkinson's disease.

Parkinson's disease (PD) has been related to impaired processing of emotional speech intonation (emotional prosody). One distinctive feature of idiopathic PD is motor symptom asymmetry, with striatal dysfunction being strongest in the hemisphere contralateral to the most affected body side. It is still unclear whether this asymmetry may affect vocal emotion perception. Here, we tested 22 PD patients (10 with predominantly left-sided [LPD] and 12 with predominantly right-sided motor symptoms) and 22 healthy controls in an event-related potential study. Sentences conveying different emotional intonations were presented in lexical and pseudo-speech versions. Task varied between an explicit and an implicit instruction. Of specific interest was emotional salience detection from prosody, reflected in the P200 component. We predicted that patients with predominantly right-striatal dysfunction (LPD) would exhibit P200 alterations. Our results support this assumption. LPD patients showed enhanced P200 amplitudes, and specific deficits were observed for disgust prosody, explicit anger processing and implicit processing of happy prosody. Lexical speech was predominantly affected while the processing of pseudo-speech was largely intact. P200 amplitude in patients correlated significantly with left motor scores and asymmetry indices. The data suggest that emotional salience detection from prosody is affected by asymmetric neuronal degeneration in PD.

Valence-specific laterality effects in vocal emotion: Interactions with stimulus type, blocking and sex

Valence-specific laterality effects have been frequently obtained in facial emotion perception but not in vocal emotion perception. We report a dichotic listening study further examining whether valence-specific laterality effects generalise to vocal emotions. Based on previous literature, we tested whether valence-specific laterality effects were dependent on blocked presentation of the emotion conditions, on the naturalness of the emotional stimuli, or on listener sex. We presented happy and sad sentences, paired with neutral counterparts, dichotically in an emotion localisation task, with vocal stimuli being preceded by verbal labels indicating target emotions. The measure was accuracy. When stimuli of the same emotion were presented as a block, a valence-specific laterality effect was demonstrated, but only in original stimuli and not morphed stimuli. There was a separate interaction with listener sex. We interpret our findings as suggesting that the valence-specific laterality hypothesis is supported only in certain circumstances. We discuss modulating factors, and we consider whether the mechanisms underlying those factors may be attentional or experiential in nature.

The Contribution of Sound Intensity in Vocal Emotion Perception: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence

Although its role is frequently stressed in acoustic profile for vocal emotion, sound intensity is frequently regarded as a control parameter in neurocognitive studies of vocal emotion, leaving its role and neural underpinnings unclear. To investigate these issues, we asked participants to rate the angry level of neutral and angry prosodies before and after sound intensity modification in Experiment 1, and recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) for mismatching emotional prosodies with and without sound intensity modification and for matching emotional prosodies while participants performed emotional feature or sound intensity congruity judgment in Experiment 2. It was found that sound intensity modification had significant effect on the rating of angry level for angry prosodies, but not for neutral ones. Moreover, mismatching emotional prosodies, relative to matching ones, induced enhanced N2/P3 complex and theta band synchronization irrespective of sound intensity modification and task demands. However, mismatching emotional prosodies with reduced sound intensity showed prolonged peak latency and decreased amplitude in N2/P3 complex and smaller theta band synchronization. These findings suggest that though it cannot categorically affect emotionality conveyed in emotional prosodies, sound intensity contributes to emotional significance quantitatively, implying that sound intensity should not simply be taken as a control parameter and its unique role needs to be specified in vocal emotion studies.

Vocal emotion perception in pseudo-sentences by secondary-school children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

There have been inconsistent findings regarding emotion identification abilities in people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Some researchers have found global or emotion-specific impairments, while others have not. The present work reports findings from an experiment testing the ability of children with ASD (primarily Asperger syndrome) to identify basic vocal emotions. Participants identified the emotion present in pseudo-sentences spoken with affective prosody (anger, fear, happiness, sadness). Participants with ASD, at secondary school, showed a modest, non-significant performance deficit compared to typically developing controls. This minor deficit was dependent on a difference in verbal ability. There was no evidence that children with ASD had emotion-specific or valence-specific deficits. By-items correlations showed that stimuli whose emotions were difficult to identify for children with ASD were also difficult to identify for controls, while confusion matrices showed similar error patterns across groups. The results are discussed in relation to the amygdala theory of autism.

Ensemble methods for spoken emotion recognition in call-centres

Machine-based emotional intelligence is a requirement for more natural interaction between humans and computer interfaces and a basic level of accurate emotion perception is needed for computer systems to respond adequately to human emotion. Humans convey emotional information both intentionally and unintentionally via speech patterns. These vocal patterns are perceived and understood by listeners during conversation. This research aims to improve the automatic perception of vocal emotion in two ways. First, we compare two emotional speech data sources: natural, spontaneous emotional speech and acted or portrayed emotional speech. This comparison demonstrates the advantages and disadvantages of both acquisition methods and how these methods affect the end application of vocal emotion recognition. Second, we look at two classification methods which have not been applied in this field: stacked generalisation and unweighted vote. We show how these techniques can yield an improvement over traditional classification methods.

Slow Speech Enhances Younger But Not Older Infants' Perception of Vocal Emotion

Infants attend more to infant-directed speech (IDS) than to adult-directed speech (ADS), but infants also prefer speech judged to be high in positive emotion over less emotional speech regardless of whether it is IDS or ADS. Emotion in voices is often conveyed by absolute pitch, pitch contours, and tempo (or duration). The purpose of our study was to explore how perceived emotion in speech is enhanced or attenuated by duration. We tested 18- and 32-week-old infants for attention to IDS that was either high or low in emotion (as judged by adults) and at two different durations (normal vs. slow). The results showed that 18-week-olds attended more to slow IDS (with affect constant), attended more to high affect (with duration constant), and showed equal attention when affect and duration were juxtaposed. In contrast, 32-week-olds showed greater attention to normal IDS regardless of its emotional level. Slower IDS may enhance younger infants' perception of vocal emotion but does not increase attention in older infants perhaps because they no longer rely on this acoustic cue for emotion. We suggest future studies to help tease apart these interpretations.

Judgment of Emotional Nonlinguistic Vocalizations: Age-Related Differences

Humans make extensive use of vocal information to attribute emotional states to other individuals. To date, most studies exploring perception of vocal emotions have done so in the context of speech prosody, although nonlinguistic emotional vocalizations represent an important, perhaps more universal, means to express emotions. Here, we explored the perception of emotional nonlinguistic vocalizations in healthy individuals, with an emphasis on potential age- and sex-related differences. Sixty participants rated 563 positive (e.g., laughs, sexual vocalizations), negative (e.g., cries, screams of fear), and neutral vocalizations (e.g., coughs), according to the valence, intensity, and authenticity of the emotion expressed. Ratings were consistent among individuals, suggesting that valence is an adequate measure of emotional categorization. An important effect of age emerged: (a) age by vocalization category interactions were observed for both valence and intensity ratings, and (b) younger participants rated stimuli as more emotional than older individuals (i.e., higher valence for positive, lower for negative, and more intense for both positive and negative). We also found a sex effect in the authenticity ratings: older women rated the vocalizations as less authentic than younger women whereas authenticity judgments did not differ between the two age groups in men. Taken together, these findings suggest that, as previously observed for facial expressions and prosody, the judgments of emotional vocalizations may vary with age.

Impaired Perception of Vocal Emotions in Parkinson's Disease: Influence of Speech Time Processing and Executive Functioning

Little is known about the underlying dimensions of impaired recognition of emotional prosody that is frequently observed in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Because patients with PD also suffer from working memory deficits and impaired time perception, the present study examined the contribution of (a) working memory (frontal executive functioning) and (b) processing of the acoustic parameter speech rate to the perception of emotional prosody in PD. Two acoustic parameters known to be important for emotional classifications (speech duration and pitch variability) were systematically varied in prosodic utterances. Twenty patients with PD and 16 healthy controls (matched for age, sex, and IQ) participated in the study. The findings imply that (1) working memory dysfunctions and perception of emotional prosody are not independent in PD, (2) PD and healthy control subjects perceived vocal emotions categorically along two acoustic manipulation continua, and (3) patients with PD show impairments in processing of speech rate information.

The contribution of speech rate and pitch variation to the perception of vocal emotions in a German and an American sample

The present study examined acoustic cue utilisation for perception of vocal emotions. Two sets of vocal-emotional stimuli were presented to 35 German and 30 American listeners: (1) sentences in German spoken with five different vocal emotions; and (2) systematically rate- or pitch-altered versions of the original emotional stimuli. In addition to response frequencies on emotional categories, activity ratings were obtained. For the systematically altered stimuli, slow rate was reliably associated with the “sad” label. In contrast, fast rate was classified as angry, frightened, or neutral. Manipulation of pitch variation was less potent than rate manipulation in influencing vocal emotional category choices. Reduced pitch variation was associated with perception as sad or neutral; greater pitch variation increased frightened, angry, and happy responses. Performance was highly similar for the two samples, although across tasks, German subjects perceived greater variability of activity in the emotional stimuli than did American participants.

The contribution of speech rate and pitch variation to the perception of vocal emotions in a German and an American sample

The present study examined acoustic cue utilisation for perception of vocal emotions. Two sets of vocal-emotional stimuli were presented to 35 German and 30 American listeners: (1) sentences in German spoken with five different vocal emotions; and (2) systematically rate- or pitch-altered versions of the original emotional stimuli. In addition to response frequencies on emotional categories, activity ratings were obtained. For the systematically altered stimuli, slow rate was reliably associated with the “sad” label. In contrast, fast rate was classified as angry, frightened, or neutral. Manipulation of pitch variation was less potent than rate manipulation in influencing vocal emotional category choices. Reduced pitch variation was associated with perception as sad or neutral; greater pitch variation increased frightened, angry, and happy responses. Performance was highly similar for the two samples, although across tasks, German subjects perceived greater variability of activity in the emotional stimuli...

Effects of pleasant and unpleasant ambient odors on human voice pitch

The perception of odors is well identified as having strong emotional correlates. It is also well known that the acoustic characteristics of the voice differ according to the emotional state. This study compared some acoustic features of the voice of 18 subjects reading the same text in pleasant (lavender) and unpleasant (pyridine) ambient odor conditions. The results revealed that the pitch of the voice was higher in the pleasant than in the unpleasant condition. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis of local and functional convergences of encoding vocal emotion and hedonic perception of odors.