Emotions in Personality and Psychopathology

Abstract

"Even though the vocal mode of affect expression has received less attention in research there seems to be reason to assume evolutionary continuity for affect vocalizations as well as for visual affect displays." p. 495 "Recent work on vocal communication in animals supports the notion that the acoustic characteristics of certain calls are optimally suited to travel large or small distances, to prevent or to allow fast localization of the sender in space, or to resist masking by noise, depending on amplitude, signal shape, and spectral composition." p. 496 "One could argue that in terms of allowing recognition of a sender's emotion in a content- and context-free judgment situation, vocal cues have, if anything, fared as least as well as facial cues - at least for some emotions (cf. surveys by Kramer, 1963; Davitz, 1964) - since even rather extreme speech distortions, such as playing the tape backwards, whispering, or low-pass filtering the signal with a cutoff frequency around 500 Hz, have not prevented listener-judges to identify emotional portrayals with better than chance accuracy." p. 509 Table 4. Summary of Results on Vocal Indicators of Emotional States (p. 513) Happiness/Joy - high pitch level, large pitch variability, loud, fast tempo Confidence - high pitch level, loud, fast tempo Anger - high pitch level, wide pitch range, large pitch variability, loud, fast tempo Fear - high pitch level, wide pitch range, large pitch variability, fast tempo Indifference - low pitch level, narrow pitch range, small pitch variability, fast tempo Contempt - low pitch level, wide pitch range, loud, slow tempo Boredom - low pitch level, narrow pitch range, soft, slow tempo Grief/Sadness - low pitch level, narrow pitch range, small pitch variability, soft, slow tempo Evaluation - loud Activation - high pitch level, wide pitch range, loud, fast tempo Potency - loud "Anger seems to be characterized by high pitche level and wide pitch range, loud voice and fast tempo, whereas the opposite ends of these vocal dimensions characterize grief/sadness: low pitch and narrow pitch range, downward pitch contour, soft voice, and slow tempo." p. 514