Universal vocal signals of emotion

Universal vocal signals of emotion Disa A Sauter (disa.sauter@mpi.nl) Department of Psychology, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom. Comparative Cognitive Anthropology, Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics, PO Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands Frank Eisner (f.eisner@mpi.nl) Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, WC1N 3AR, United Kingdom Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics, PO Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands Paul Ekman Human Interaction Laboratory, University of California San Francisco, 401 Parnassus Avenue, San Francisco CA 94143 USA Sophie K Scott (sophie.scott@ucl.ac.uk) Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, WC1N 3AR, United Kingdom Abstract Emotional signals allow for the sharing of important information with conspecifics, for example to warn them of danger. Humans use a range of different cues to communicate to others how they feel, including facial, vocal, and gestural signals. Although much is known about facial expressions of emotion, less research has focused on affect in the voice. We compare British listeners to individuals from remote Namibian villages who have had no exposure to Western culture, and examine recognition of non-verbal emotional vocalizations, such as screams and laughs. We show that a number of emotions can be universally recognized from non-verbal vocal signals. In addition we demonstrate the specificity of this pattern, with a set of additional emotions only recognized within, but not across these cultural groups. Our findings indicate that a small set of primarily negative emotions have evolved signals across several modalities, while most positive emotions are communicated with culture-specific signals. Keywords: emotion; voice; happiness; affective signals. Background Some human traits are shared by all human beings, despite differences in language, culture and ecology. These psychological universals tell us what features of the human mind are part of our shared biological heritage and which are products of culture and language. Because all humans share the vast majority of their genetic makeup with all other humans, there is great similarity in the physical features that are typical for our species, while minor characteristics vary between individuals. Similarly to physical features, many aspects of the human psychology are shared. For example, all human societies have complex systems of communication to convey their thoughts, feelings, and intentions to those around them (Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch, 2002). But although there are some commonalities between different communicative systems, speakers of different languages cannot understand each other. Or rather, they cannot understand either other’s words and sentences. Other aspects of communicative systems do not rely on common lexical codes and may be shared across linguistic and cultural borders. One candidate of communicative systems for constituting a psychological universal is emotional signals. Humans use a range of signals to communicate emotions, including vocalizations, facial expressions, and postural cues. Auditory signals allows for affective communication when the recipient cannot see the sender, for example, across a distance or at night. In addition, young infants are sensitive to vocal cues from the very beginning of life, when their visual system is still relatively immature (Mehler, Bertoncini & Barrier, Vocal signals of emotions can occur overlaid on speech in the form of affective prosody (Scherer, Banse & Wallbott, 2001). However, humans also make use of a range of non- verbal vocalizations to communicate how they feel, such as screams and laughs. In this study we investigate whether these kinds of non-verbal emotional vocalizations communicate the same affective states regardless of the listener’s culture. Currently, the only available cross-cultural data comes from studies of emotional prosody in speech (e.g., Scherer et al., 2001). This work has indicated that listeners can infer some affective states from emotionally inflected speech across cultural boundaries. However, emotional information overlaid on speech (or nonsense-speech) is restricted by the segmental and supra-segmental structure of speech. In contrast, non-