Recognizing vocal emotions in Mandarin Chinese: A validated database of Chinese vocal emotional stimuli

To establish a valid database of vocal emotional stimuli in Mandarin Chinese, a set of Chinese pseudosentences (i.e., semantically meaningless sentences that resembled real Chinese) were produced by four native Mandarin speakers to express seven emotional meanings: anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness, pleasant surprise, and neutrality. These expressions were identified by a group of native Mandarin listeners in a seven-alternative forced choice task, and items reaching a recognition rate of at least three times chance performance in the seven-choice task were selected as a valid database and then subjected to acoustic analysis. The results demonstrated expected variations in both perceptual and acoustic patterns of the seven vocal emotions in Mandarin. For instance, fear, anger, sadness, and neutrality were associated with relatively high recognition, whereas happiness, disgust, and pleasant surprise were recognized less accurately. Acoustically, anger and pleasant surprise exhibited relatively high mean f0 values and large variation in f0 and amplitude; in contrast, sadness, disgust, fear, and neutrality exhibited relatively low mean f0 values and small amplitude variations, and happiness exhibited a moderate mean f0 value and f0 variation. Emotional expressions varied systematically in speech rate and harmonics-to-noise ratio values as well. This validated database is available to the research community and will contribute to future studies of emotional prosody for a number of purposes. To access the database, please contact pan.liu@mail.mcgill.ca.     

The role of positive emotions in positive psychology. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions

In this article, the author describes a new theoretical perspective on positive emotions and situates this new perspective within the emerging field of positive psychology. The broaden-and-build theory posits that experiences of positive emotions broaden people's momentary thought-action repertoires, which in turn serves to build their enduring personal resources, ranging from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources. Preliminary empirical evidence supporting the broaden-and-build theory is reviewed, and open empirical questions that remain to be tested are identified. The theory and findings suggest that the capacity to experience positive emotions may be a fundamental human strength central to the study of human flourishing.     

Categorical perception of vocal emotion expressions

Continua of vocal emotion expressions, ranging from one expression to another, were created using speech synthesis. Each emotion continuum consisted of expressions differing by equal physical amounts. In 2 experiments, subjects identified the emotion of each expression and discriminated between pairs of expressions. Identification results show that the continua were perceived as 2 distinct sections separated by a sudden category boundary. Also, discrimination accuracy was generally higher for pairs of stimuli falling across category boundaries than for pairs belonging to the same category. These results suggest that vocal expressions are perceived categorically. Results are interpreted from an evolutionary perspective on the function of vocal expression.     

Facial expressions and the regulation of emotions

In the two decades since contemporary psychologists produced strong evidence confirming Darwin's century-old hypothesis of the innateness and universality of certain facial expressions of emotions, research on expressive behavior has become well established in developmental, social, and personality psychology and in psychophysiology. There are also signs of increased interest in emotions in clinical psychology and the neurosciences. Despite the success of the work on emotion expression and the upward trend of interest in emotions in general, the fundamental issue of the relation between emotion expression and emotion experience or feeling state remains controversial. A new developmental model of expression-feeling relations provides a framework for reevaluating previous research and for understanding the conditions under which expressions are effective in activating and regulating feeling states. The model has implications for research, socialization practices, and psychotherapy.     

Mixed emotions: holistic and analytic perception of facial expressions

In the face literature, it is debated whether the identification of facial expressions requires holistic (i.e., whole face) or analytic (i.e., parts-based) information. In this study, happy and angry composite expressions were created in which the top and bottom face halves formed either an incongruent (e.g., angry top + happy bottom) or congruent composite expression (e.g., happy top + happy bottom). Participants reported the expression in the target top or bottom half of the face. In Experiment 1, the target half in the incongruent condition was identified less accurately and more slowly relative to the baseline isolated expression or neutral face conditions. In contrast, no differences were found between congruent and the baseline conditions. In Experiment 2, the effects of exposure duration were tested by presenting faces for 20, 60, 100 and 120 ms. Interference effects for the incongruent faces appeared at the earliest 20 ms interval and persisted for the 60, 100 and 120 ms intervals. In contrast, no differences were found between the congruent and baseline face conditions at any exposure interval. In Experiment 3, it was found that spatial alignment impaired the recognition of incongruent expressions, but had no effect on congruent expressions. These results are discussed in terms of holistic and analytic processing of facial expressions.     

The eyes have it: making positive expressions more positive and negative expressions more negative

Facial expressions frequently involve multiple individual facial actions. How do facial actions combine to create emotionally meaningful expressions? Infants produce positive and negative facial expressions at a range of intensities. It may be that a given facial action can index the intensity of both positive (smiles) and negative (cry-face) expressions. Objective, automated measurements of facial action intensity were paired with continuous ratings of emotional valence to investigate this possibility. Degree of eye constriction (the Duchenne marker) and mouth opening were each uniquely associated with smile intensity and, independently, with cry-face intensity. In addition, degree of eye constriction and mouth opening were each unique predictors of emotion valence ratings. Eye constriction and mouth opening index the intensity of both positive and negative infant facial expressions, suggesting parsimony in the early communication of emotion.     

Facial expressions of emotions and ethological behavioral categories

The purpose of this study was to measure the capacity of human subjects to match facial expressions of emotions and behavioral categories that represented the motivational states they are supposed to illustrate. 100 university students were shown facial stimuli they had to classify using ethological behavioral categories. The results showed that accuracy of judgment was over-all lower than what was usually found when fundamental emotional categories were used. The data also indicated that the relation between emotional expressions and behavioral tendencies was more complex than expected.     

Recognition of facial expressions of emotions by 3-year-olds

Very few large-scale studies have focused on emotional facial expression recognition (FER) in 3-year-olds, an age of rapid social and language development. We studied FER in 808 healthy 3-year-olds using verbal and nonverbal computerized tasks for four basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, and fear). Three-year-olds showed differential performance on the verbal and nonverbal FER tasks, especially with respect to fear. That is to say, fear was one of the most accurately recognized facial expressions as matched nonverbally and the least accurately recognized facial expression as labeled verbally. Sex did not influence emotion-matching nor emotion-labeling performance after adjusting for basic matching or labeling ability. Three-year-olds made systematic errors in emotion-labeling. Namely, happy expressions were often confused with fearful expressions, whereas negative expressions were often confused with other negative expressions. Together, these findings suggest that 3-year-olds' FER skills strongly depend on task specifications. Importantly, fear was the most sensitive facial expression in this regard. Finally, in line with previous studies, we found that recognized emotion categories are initially broad, including emotions of the same valence, as reflected in the nonrandom errors of 3-year-olds.     

Processing emotions in sounds: cross-domain aftereffects of vocal utterances and musical sounds

Nonlinguistic signals in the voice and musical instruments play a critical role in communicating emotion. Although previous research suggests a common mechanism for emotion processing in music and speech, the precise relationship between the two domains is unclear due to the paucity of direct evidence. By applying the adaptation paradigm developed by Bestelmeyer, Rouger, DeBruine, and Belin [2010. Auditory adaptation in vocal affect perception. Cognition, 117(2), 217–223. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.08.008], this study shows cross-domain aftereffects from vocal to musical sounds. Participants heard an angry or fearful sound four times, followed by a test sound and judged whether the test sound was angry or fearful. Results show cross-domain aftereffects in one direction – vocal utterances to musical sounds, not vice-versa. This effect occurred primarily for angry vocal sounds. It is argued that there is a unidirectional relationship between vocal and musical sounds where emotion processing of vocal sounds encompasses musical sounds but not vice-versa.     

A discrete emotions approach to positive emotion disturbance in depression

Converging findings suggest that depressed individuals exhibit disturbances in positive emotion. No study, however, has ascertained which specific positive emotions are implicated in depression. We report two studies that compare how depressive symptoms relate to distinct positive emotions at both trait and state levels of assessment. In Study 1 (N=185), we examined associations between depressive symptoms and three trait positive emotions (pride, happy, amusement). Study 2 compared experiential and autonomic reactivity to pride, happy, and amusement film stimuli between depressive (n=24; DS) and non-depressive (n=31; NDS) symptom groups. Results indicate that symptoms of depression were most strongly associated with decreased trait pride and decreased positive emotion experience to pride-eliciting films. Discussion focuses on the implications these findings have for understanding emotion deficits in depression as well as for the general study of positive emotion.     

Perceptual cues in nonverbal vocal expressions of emotion

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the most widely used indirect measure of attitudes in social psychology. It has been suggested that artefacts such as salience asymmetries and familiarity can influence performance on the IAT. Chang and Mitchell (2009) Chang, B. and Mitchell, C. J. 2009. Processing fluency as a source of salience asymmetries in the Implicit Association Test. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62: 2030–2054. [Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] proposed that the ease with which IAT stimuli are classified (classification fluency) is the common mechanism underlying both of these factors. In the current study, we investigated the effect of classification fluency on the IAT and trialled a measure—the split IAT—for dissociating between the effects of valence and salience in the IAT. Across six experiments, we examined the relationship between target classification fluency and salience asymmetries in the IAT. In the standard IAT, the more fluently classified target category was, all else being equal, compatible with pleasant attributes over unpleasant attributes. Furthermore, the more fluently classified target category was more easily classified with the more salient attribute category in the split IAT, independent of evaluative associations. This suggests that the more fluently classified category is also the more salient target category.     

Antecedents of everyday positive emotions: An experience sampling analysis

The focus of this study is on everyday positive emotions and their relations to critical appraisal antecedents. Following from classical appraisal theory and Pekrun’s (2006) control-value theory of achievement emotions, two research questions were addressed, namely whether cognitive appraisals of control and value were related to discrete positive emotions in everyday situations and whether control and value antecedents interact in predicting these emotions. We further investigated whether control/value and positive emotion relations changed as a function of situational factors (achievement vs. non-achievement settings). 50 university freshmen (78% female) were assessed by use of the experience sampling method for a period of 1 week, with intraindividual analyses conducted using a multilevel, idiographic approach. Consistent with our hypotheses, the emotions of enjoyment, pride, and contentment were positively related to control and value appraisals. Further, control and value interacted to predict these positive emotions. The strength of appraisal/positive emotion relations was equivalent across achievement vs. non-achievement settings. Implications for future research are discussed.     

The role of discrete emotions in health outcomes: A critical review

Global aspects of emotion have been central to psychosocial theories of health and health behavior for several decades. A growing body of research has documented key roles for several broad affective constructs – notably anxiety, depression, and anger/hostility – in areas ranging from basic physiological processes, health behaviors, and symptom reporting, to screening and detection behaviors and decision making. Despite this growth, however, the emotions-health literature remains scattered. Mechanisms are poorly understood and several key emotions – embarrassment, disgust, guilt and hope – have scarcely been examined. In presenting the advantages of a discrete emotions perspective, the current report reviews and critiques data describing the relations between discrete emotions and health. It presents a developmental-functionalist framework within which to more systematically consider the links between emotions and health. It is suggested that discrete emotions perspectives provide guidance for understanding the physiological, motivational, and cognitive pathways linking emotions and health and thus their impact on health outcomes.     

Good vibrations: Human interval timing in the vibrotactile modality

This article reports a detailed examination of timing in the vibrotactile modality and comparison with that of visual and auditory modalities. Three experiments investigated human timing in the vibrotactile modality. In Experiment 1, a staircase threshold procedure with a standard duration of 1,000 ms revealed a difference threshold of 160.35 ms for vibrotactile stimuli, which was significantly higher than that for auditory stimuli (103.25 ms) but not significantly lower than that obtained for visual stimuli (196.76 ms). In Experiment 2, verbal estimation revealed a significant slope difference between vibrotactile and auditory timing, but not between vibrotactile and visual timing. That is, both vibrations and lights were judged as shorter than sounds, and this comparative difference was greater at longer durations than at shorter ones. In Experiment 3, performance on a temporal generalization task showed characteristics consistent with the predications of scalar expectancy theory (SET: Gibbon, 1977) with both mean accuracy and scalar variance exhibited. The results were modelled using the modified Church and Gibbon model (MCG; derived by Wearden, 1992, from Church & Gibbon 1982). The model was found to give an excellent fit to the data, and the parameter values obtained were compared with those for visual and auditory temporal generalization. The pattern of results suggest that timing in the vibrotactile modality conforms to SET and that the internal clock speed for vibrotactile stimuli is significantly slower than that for auditory stimuli, which is logically consistent with the significant differences in difference threshold that were obtained.     

Minimal cues in the vocal communication of affect: Judging emotions from content-masked speech

Vocal expressions of emotions taken from a recorded version of a play were content. masked by using electronic filtering, randomized splicing and a combination of both techniques in addition to a no-treatment condition in a 2×2 design. Untrained listener-judges rated the voice samples in the four conditions on 20 semantic differential scales. Irrespective of the severe reduction in the number and types of vocal cues in the masking conditions, the mean ratings of the judges in all four groups agreed on a level significantly beyond chance expectations on the differential position of the emotional expressions in a multidimensional space of emotional meaning. The results suggest that a minimal set of vocal cues consisting of pitch level and variation, amplitude level and variation, and rate of articulation may be sufficient to communicate the evaluation, potency, and activity dimensions of emotional meaning. Each of these dimensions may be associated with a specific pattern of vocal cues or cue combinations. No differential effects of the type of content-masking for specific emotions were found. Systematic effects of the masking techniques consisted in a lowering of the perceived activity level of the emotions in the case of electronic filtering, and more positive ratings on the evaluative dimension in the case of randomized splicing. Electronic filtering tended to decrease, randomized splicing tended to increase inter-rater reliability.This research was supported by a research grant (GS-2654) from the Division of Social Sciences of the National Science Foundation to Robert Rosenthal.     

Gender differences in judgments of multiple emotions from facial expressions

The authors tested gender differences in emotion judgments by utilizing a new judgment task (Studies 1 and 2) and presenting stimuli at the edge of conscious awareness (Study 2). Women were more accurate than men even under conditions of minimal stimulus information. Women's ratings were more variable across scales, and they rated correct target emotions higher than did men.     

Feeling good: autonomic nervous system responding in five positive emotions

Although dozens of studies have examined the autonomic nervous system (ANS) aspects of negative emotions, less is known about ANS responding in positive emotion. An evolutionary framework was used to define five positive emotions in terms of fitness-enhancing function, and to guide hypotheses regarding autonomic responding. In a repeated measures design, participants viewed sets of visual images eliciting these positive emotions (anticipatory enthusiasm, attachment love, nurturant love, amusement, and awe) plus an emotionally neutral state. Peripheral measures of sympathetic and vagal parasympathetic activation were assessed. Results indicated that the emotion conditions were characterized by qualitatively distinct profiles of autonomic activation, suggesting the existence of multiple, physiologically distinct positive emotions.