Validation of affective and neutral sentence content for prosodic testing

Conducting a study of emotional prosody often requires that one have a valid set of stimuli for assessing perceived emotion in vocal intonation. In this study, we created a list of sentences with both affective and neutral content, and then validated them against rater opinion. Participants read sentences with content that implied happiness, sadness, anger, fear, or neutrality and rated how well they could imagine each sentence being expressed in each emotion. Coefficients of variation and intraclass correlations were calculated to narrow the list to affective sentences that had high agreement and neutral sentences that had low agreement. We found that raters could easily identify most emotional content and did not ascribe any unique emotion to most neutral content. We also found differences between the intensity of male and female ratings. The final list of sentences is available on the Internet (www.med.upenn.edu/bbl/) and can be recorded for use as stimuli for prosodic studies.