The Proposed Research Work

Abstract

This chapter describes in details the materials, procedures, participants, testing, and data analyses exploited for the cross-modal and cross-cultural experiments on the perception of emotions narrated in this book. Two databases consisting of realistic, dynamic, and mutual related visual and vocal emotional information are described. The databases were constructed to allow an actual comparison between the effectiveness of visual and vocal cues in conveying emotional expressions. In order to investigate if the ability to recognize emotional expressions as a function of the channel is also affected by the cultural context and in particular by the language, the stimuli were extracted from American (as a global spread language) and Italian (as a country specific language) live recording movies. The experiments involved participants from five different Western cultures and languages to explore possible variations in inferring emotions across similar cultures, highlighting the role of the familiarity with the cultural context and language. The data collected were analyzed computing different repeated ANOVA measurements with the goal to reveal the effect of the communication channel, and both stimuli and participants “cultural context and language” on the recognition of the emotional expressions, as well as, to allow a cross-cultural comparison of the results.