2010/08/25

Breitenstein, C., Van Lancker, D., & Daum, I. (2001). The contribution of speech rate and pitch variation to the perception of vocal emotions in a German and an American sample. Cognition and Emotion, 15(1), 57–79.

Presentation: Shelly

Summary: Sally

In this study, the respective roles of two acoustic cues, speech rate and pitch variation, were investigated for emotion perception. In total, 30 American and 35 German subjects were recruited to perceive 240 synthesized German stimuli [5 (emotional categories: happy, neutral, sad, angry, and frightened) x 4 (sentences of different meanings) x 6 (factor levels: 0.9, 0.7, 0.5 (less); 1.1, 1.3, 1.5 (more)] based on the same original recordings from a professional German actress. As American subjects were not fluent in German, they were given the translation of the German stimuli beforehand. All subjects were instructed to do two tasks for each manipulation: an emotional categorization which contained the five emotion labels, and a five-point activity rating.

In general, the two subject groups showed similar patterns:  For the manipulation of speech rate, consistent with previous findings, higher rates were considered as a powerful cue in perceiving angry, frightened, or neutral emotions (Banse & Scherer, 1996; Scherer, 1986; Scherer & Oshinsy, 1977), whereas slower rates were related to sadness and anger (Bergmann et al., 1988). In addition, the label of “happy” was used the least frequently, and was scarcely confused with the other four categories. Results showed that increases in speech rate were associated with higher activity ratings, and in general, German subjects were more “sensitive” to the decrease in rate for happy, sad, and neutral stimuli. In contrast, the manipulation of the other acoustic cue, pitch variation, was less influential: greater pitch variation served as a cue for angry, frightened, or happy emotions, whereas small variation is considered as a cue for sadness or neutral emotions, consistent with earlier findings (Bergmann et al., 1988). Ratings of this manipulation increased with greater pitch variation, independent of the emotional context.