It is possible that for those emotions which only had medium recognition scores, one or two acoustic parameters which are essential for the expression of the emotion are inconsistently used by the actors. Such idiosyncratic modulation of only a few parameters would not greatly affect the profile correlations. Thus whilst the profiles are consistent and highly correlated, some single important acoustic parameters may vary between actors, leading to poorer recognition of some utterances. It is also possible that in some cases, a number of poorly recognized utterances were not characterized by consistent profiles, due to high variability between speakers. Thus the poorly recognized sets of utterances for these emotions did not represent prototypical emotion profiles.
White columns are for poorly recognized and shaded columns for well recognized utterances.
Although utterances expressing shame had well defined profiles, they were very poorly recognized. Comparison of the acoustic profiles of sadness and shame indicates that actors may have been using the sadness prototype when trying to express shame. It is apparent that studying actor portrayals of vocal emotion expression can reveal much about the nature of the acoustic parameters involved in the identification of emotion by a listener. At the same time certain emotions either do not seem amenable to consistent portrayal by actors or are not readily recognized by listeners. Certain emotions, such as hot anger and boredom, are portrayed using highly prototypical acoustic profiles which are easily produced by actors and accurately decoded by listeners.