Gradient or contours cues? A gating experiment for the timing of the emotional information

Abstract

This work aims at measuring the anticipated perception of emotions on minimal linguistic units, to evaluate if the underlying cognitive processing is compatible with the hypothesis of gradient contours. Selected monosyllabic stimuli extracted from an expressive corpus and expressing anxiety, disappointment, disgust, disquiet, joy, resignation, sadness and satisfaction, were gradually presented to naïve judges in a gating experiment. Results strengthen the hypothesis of gradient processing by showing that identification along successive gates of most of expressions follow a linear pattern typical of a contour-like processing, while expressions of satisfaction present distinct gradient values that make possible an early identification of affective values. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.