WHERE DID THE ANGER GO? THE ROLE OF CONTEXT IN INTERPRETING EMOTION IN SPEECH

Abstract

Context has greater explanatory force regarding the perception of emotions in speech than any causative association we may attempt to make between phonetic features and psychological labels. Informants, when asked to judge whether a speaker sounds angry or not, make different decisions according to whether they hear utterances in-isolation or in-context. There was a strong tendency for ‘anger’ to be heard in the isolated extracts, but not in the ‘in-context’ forms.