The primacy of categories in the recognition of 12 emotions in speech prosody across two cultures

Central to emotion science is the degree to which categories, such as awe, or broader affective features, such as valence, underlie the recognition of emotional expression. To explore the processes by which people recognize emotion from prosody, US and Indian participants were asked to judge the emotion categories or affective features communicated by 2,519 speech samples produced by 100 actors from five cultures. With large-scale statistical inference methods, we find that prosody can communicate at least 12 distinct kinds of emotion that are preserved across the two cultures. Analyses of the semantic and acoustic structure of emotion recognition reveal that emotion categories drive emotion recognition more so than affective features, including valence. In contrast to discrete emotion theories, however, emotion categories are bridged by gradients representing blends of emotions. Our findings, visualized within an interactive map (https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/venec/map.html), reveal a complex, high-dimensional space of emotional states recognized cross-culturally in speech prosody.