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Encoding Conditions Affect Recognition of Vocally Expressed Emotions Across Cultures

Although the expression of emotions in humans is considered to be largely universal, cultural effects contribute to both emotion expression and recognition. To disentangle the interplay between these factors, play-acted and authentic (non-instructed) vocal expressions of emotions were used, on the a...

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Autores principales: Jürgens, Rebecca, Drolet, Matthis, Pirow, Ralph, Scheiner, Elisabeth, Fischer, Julia
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3595515/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23493452
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00111
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author Jürgens, Rebecca
Drolet, Matthis
Pirow, Ralph
Scheiner, Elisabeth
Fischer, Julia
author_facet Jürgens, Rebecca
Drolet, Matthis
Pirow, Ralph
Scheiner, Elisabeth
Fischer, Julia
author_sort Jürgens, Rebecca
collection PubMed
description Although the expression of emotions in humans is considered to be largely universal, cultural effects contribute to both emotion expression and recognition. To disentangle the interplay between these factors, play-acted and authentic (non-instructed) vocal expressions of emotions were used, on the assumption that cultural effects may contribute differentially to the recognition of staged and spontaneous emotions. Speech tokens depicting four emotions (anger, sadness, joy, fear) were obtained from German radio archives and re-enacted by professional actors, and presented to 120 participants from Germany, Romania, and Indonesia. Participants in all three countries were poor at distinguishing between play-acted and spontaneous emotional utterances (58.73% correct on average with only marginal cultural differences). Nevertheless, authenticity influenced emotion recognition: across cultures, anger was recognized more accurately when play-acted (z = 15.06, p < 0.001) and sadness when authentic (z = 6.63, p < 0.001), replicating previous findings from German populations. German subjects revealed a slight advantage in recognizing emotions, indicating a moderate in-group advantage. There was no difference between Romanian and Indonesian subjects in the overall emotion recognition. Differential cultural effects became particularly apparent in terms of differential biases in emotion attribution. While all participants labeled play-acted expressions as anger more frequently than expected, German participants exhibited a further bias toward choosing anger for spontaneous stimuli. In contrast to the German sample, Romanian and Indonesian participants were biased toward choosing sadness. These results support the view that emotion recognition rests on a complex interaction of human universals and cultural specificities. Whether and in which way the observed biases are linked to cultural differences in self-construal remains an issue for further investigation.
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spelling pubmed-35955152013-03-14 Encoding Conditions Affect Recognition of Vocally Expressed Emotions Across Cultures Jürgens, Rebecca Drolet, Matthis Pirow, Ralph Scheiner, Elisabeth Fischer, Julia Front Psychol Psychology Although the expression of emotions in humans is considered to be largely universal, cultural effects contribute to both emotion expression and recognition. To disentangle the interplay between these factors, play-acted and authentic (non-instructed) vocal expressions of emotions were used, on the assumption that cultural effects may contribute differentially to the recognition of staged and spontaneous emotions. Speech tokens depicting four emotions (anger, sadness, joy, fear) were obtained from German radio archives and re-enacted by professional actors, and presented to 120 participants from Germany, Romania, and Indonesia. Participants in all three countries were poor at distinguishing between play-acted and spontaneous emotional utterances (58.73% correct on average with only marginal cultural differences). Nevertheless, authenticity influenced emotion recognition: across cultures, anger was recognized more accurately when play-acted (z = 15.06, p < 0.001) and sadness when authentic (z = 6.63, p < 0.001), replicating previous findings from German populations. German subjects revealed a slight advantage in recognizing emotions, indicating a moderate in-group advantage. There was no difference between Romanian and Indonesian subjects in the overall emotion recognition. Differential cultural effects became particularly apparent in terms of differential biases in emotion attribution. While all participants labeled play-acted expressions as anger more frequently than expected, German participants exhibited a further bias toward choosing anger for spontaneous stimuli. In contrast to the German sample, Romanian and Indonesian participants were biased toward choosing sadness. These results support the view that emotion recognition rests on a complex interaction of human universals and cultural specificities. Whether and in which way the observed biases are linked to cultural differences in self-construal remains an issue for further investigation. Frontiers Media S.A. 2013-03-13 /pmc/articles/PMC3595515/ /pubmed/23493452 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00111 Text en Copyright © 2013 Jürgens, Drolet, Pirow, Scheiner and Fischer. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.
spellingShingle Psychology
Jürgens, Rebecca
Drolet, Matthis
Pirow, Ralph
Scheiner, Elisabeth
Fischer, Julia
Encoding Conditions Affect Recognition of Vocally Expressed Emotions Across Cultures
title Encoding Conditions Affect Recognition of Vocally Expressed Emotions Across Cultures
title_full Encoding Conditions Affect Recognition of Vocally Expressed Emotions Across Cultures
title_fullStr Encoding Conditions Affect Recognition of Vocally Expressed Emotions Across Cultures
title_full_unstemmed Encoding Conditions Affect Recognition of Vocally Expressed Emotions Across Cultures
title_short Encoding Conditions Affect Recognition of Vocally Expressed Emotions Across Cultures
title_sort encoding conditions affect recognition of vocally expressed emotions across cultures
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3595515/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23493452
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00111
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