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

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  • Alan S. Cowen

    (University of California, Berkeley)

  • Petri Laukka

    (Stockholm University)

  • Hillary Anger Elfenbein

    (Washington University)

  • Runjing Liu

    (University of California, Berkeley)

  • Dacher Keltner

    (University of California, Berkeley)

Abstract

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 5 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 2 cultures. Analyses of the semantic and acoustic structure of the recognition of emotions reveal that emotion categories drive the recognition of emotions 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, reveal a complex, high-dimensional space of emotional states recognized cross-culturally in speech prosody.

Suggested Citation

  • Alan S. Cowen & Petri Laukka & Hillary Anger Elfenbein & Runjing Liu & Dacher Keltner, 2019. "The primacy of categories in the recognition of 12 emotions in speech prosody across two cultures," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 3(4), pages 369-382, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:nat:nathum:v:3:y:2019:i:4:d:10.1038_s41562-019-0533-6
    DOI: 10.1038/s41562-019-0533-6
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    Cited by:

    1. Faheem Aslam & Tahir Mumtaz Awan & Jabir Hussain Syed & Aisha Kashif & Mahwish Parveen, 2020. "Sentiments and emotions evoked by news headlines of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 7(1), pages 1-9, December.
    2. Pol van Rijn & Pauline Larrouy-Maestri, 2023. "Modelling individual and cross-cultural variation in the mapping of emotions to speech prosody," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 7(3), pages 386-396, March.
    3. Mathilde Marie Duville & Luz María Alonso-Valerdi & David I. Ibarra-Zarate, 2021. "Mexican Emotional Speech Database Based on Semantic, Frequency, Familiarity, Concreteness, and Cultural Shaping of Affective Prosody," Data, MDPI, vol. 6(12), pages 1-34, December.

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