Perception of emotional prosody: investigating the relation between the discrete and dimensional approaches to emotions

Author(s)

da Silva, Wellington ^[1] ; Barbosa, Plinio Almeida ^[1]

Affiliation

^[1] Univ Estadual Campinas, Campinas, SP - Brazil

• Document type: Journal article
• Source: REVISTA DE ESTUDOS DA LINGUAGEM; v. 25, n. 3, p. 1075-1103, JUL-SEP 2017.
• Web of Science Citations: 0

Abstract

Emotional phenomena can be described according to various psychological approaches, the most adopted being the discrete (basic) and the dimensional ones. This study aimed at investigating the relation between the perception of some basic emotions and emotional dimensions in speech, as well as determining which acoustic cues are related to their perception. We conducted two perception experiments with utterances selected from a foreign language (Swedish) of which the listeners had no knowledge. In the first one, Brazilian subjects rated on 5-point scales the expressivity of four basic emotions: joy, anger, sadness, and calmness. In the second, a distinct group of Brazilian subjects rated the expressivity of five emotional dimensions: activation, fairness, valence, motivation, and involvement. The perception of the basic emotions and of the emotional dimensions was then compared by means of the Spearman's correlation coefficient. The five emotional dimensions were significantly correlated to some extent with the basic emotions, and these correlations were, in general, consistent with the literature and with the hypotheses that guided this study. We also performed an acoustic analysis, in which twelve acoustic parameters were automatically computed for the utterances evaluated by the listeners. The parameters which correlated better with the listeners' judgments were fundamental frequency (median, interquantile semi-amplitude, 99.5% quantile), spectral tilt (mean and standard deviation), and LTAS slope. We concluded that it is possible to describe the perception of basic emotions in speech as a combination of emotional dimensions and that emotional dimensions may be better for describing the expression of emotions in speech. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 12/04254-4 - Acoustic-phonetic analysis of the expression of emotions in real life testimonies.
• Grantee: Wellington da Silva
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• FAPESP's process: 13/06082-9 - Expression of emotions in speech: differences and similarities between the Brazilian and the Swedish cultures
• Grantee: Wellington da Silva
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree