Language and gender effect in decoding emotional information: A study on Lithuanian subjects

Abstract

The present work explores how language specificity and gender affect the emotional decoding process. It investigates the ability of Lithuanian male and female subjects to decode emotional information through male and female vocal and visual emotional expressions. The exploited emotional stimuli are based on extracts of American English (a globally spread language), and Italian (a country specific language) movies. The assumption is that the recognition of the emotional states expressed by the actors/actresses will change according to the familiarity of the languages and the subjects' gender. Results show that Lithuanian subjects recognition accuracy is affected by the language specificity of the stimuli. Moreover, a gender effect occurs in decoding Italian vocal stimuli. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.