Emotion Inferences from Vocal Expression Correlate Across Languages and Cultures

TLDR

Emotion perception from facial expressions is well studied cross‑culturally, but vocal emotion inference remains largely unexplored. The study examined whether listeners can accurately infer emotions from vocal expressions across nine countries. Professional German actors produced recordings of anger, sadness, fear, joy, and neutral voices, and listeners in nine countries judged the emotions. Accuracy averaged 66 % overall, ranging from 74 % in Germany to 52 % in Indonesia, with similar confusion patterns across countries, indicating shared inference rules but decreasing accuracy with language dissimilarity, suggesting culture‑ and language‑specific paralinguistic influences.

Abstract

Whereas the perception of emotion from facial expression has been extensively studied cross-culturally, little is known about judges’ ability to infer emotion from vocal cues. This article reports the results from a study conducted in nine countries in Europe, the United States, and Asia on vocal emotion portrayals of anger, sadness, fear, joy, and neutral voice as produced by professional German actors. Data show an overall accuracy of 66% across all emotions and countries. Although accuracy was substantially better than chance, there were sizable differences ranging from 74% in Germany to 52% in Indonesia. However, patterns of confusion were very similar across all countries. These data suggest the existence of similar inference rules from vocal expression across cultures. Generally, accuracy decreased with increasing language dissimilarity from German in spite of the use of language-free speech samples. It is concluded that culture- and language-specific paralinguistic patterns may influence the decoding process.