Expression of emotions in speech: differences and similarities between the Brazilian and the Swedish cultures

• Grant number: 13/06082-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: September 01, 2013
• End date: November 30, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Plinio Almeida Barbosa
• Grantee: Wellington da Silva
• Supervisor: Åsa Abelin
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Gothenburg, Sweden
• Associated to the scholarship: 12/04254-4 - Acoustic-phonetic analysis of the expression of emotions in real life testimonies., BP.MS

Abstract

A large body of evidence for the universality of a subset of emotions has been presented over decades of research. However, several studies also showed differences in how some emotions can vary in terms of expression among different cultures. This problem is also evident in the lexicon of the languages, since the way each culture categorizes the antecedent events gives rise to several words to express the emotions which often does not have lexical correspondents in other languages. The research which is proposed in this project aims at investigating the role of the lexicon and the culture in perceiving emotions in speech. The study will be conducted with Swedish and Brazilian listeners, who are going to hear stretches of emotional speech in their mother language and also in the foreign language (Swedish and Brazilian Portuguese). Subjects will be asked to assess a set of emotion-related lexical items according to a 5-level Likert scale. The same stretches of speech will also be analysed acoustically by the measure of some acoustic parameters such as fundamental frequency, intensity, spectral emphasis and Long-Term Average Spectrum. In this way, it will be possible to study which of the measured acoustic parameters are affected by the speakers' emotions and to what extent, as well as which of them the judges used to infer the speakers' emotions. By means of PCA analyses, it will be possible to infer which lexical items explain the same emotion, working as synonyms (or antonyms) or combining themselves to characterize a particular emotion as a whole. (AU)

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

DA SILVA, WELLINGTON; BARBOSA, PLINIO ALMEIDA. Perception of emotional prosody: investigating the relation between the discrete and dimensional approaches to emotions. REVISTA DE ESTUDOS DA LINGUAGEM, v. 25, n. 3, p. 1075-1103, JUL-SEP 2017. (12/04254-4, 13/06082-9)

WELLINGTON DA SILVA; PLINIO ALMEIDA BARBOSA; ÅSA ABELIN. Percepção intercultural e interlinguística de emoções autênticas na fala: Estudo fonético-acústico com sujeitos brasileiros e suecos. DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, v. 32, n. 2, p. 449-480, 2016-08-00. (12/04254-4, 13/06082-9)