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Vocal Cues Underlying Youth and Adult Portrayals of Socio-emotional Expressions

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Abstract

Despite known differences in the acoustic properties of children’s and adults’ voices, no work to date has examined the vocal cues associated with emotional prosody in youth. The current study investigated whether child (n = 24, 17 female, aged 9–15) and adult (n = 30, 15 female, aged 18–63) actors differed in the vocal cues underlying their portrayals of basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness) and social expressions (meanness, friendliness). We also compared the acoustic characteristics of meanness and friendliness to comparable basic emotions. The pattern of distinctions between expressions varied as a function of age for voice quality and mean pitch. Specifically, adults’ portrayals of the various expressions were more distinct in mean pitch than children’s, whereas children’s representations differed more in voice quality than adults’. Given the importance of pitch variables for the interpretation of a speaker’s intended emotion, expressions generated by adults may thus be easier for listeners to decode than those of children. Moreover, the vocal cues associated with the social expressions of meanness and friendliness were distinct from those of basic emotions like anger and happiness respectively. Overall, our findings highlight marked differences in the ways in which adults and children convey socio-emotional expressions vocally, and expand our understanding of the communication of paralanguage in social contexts. Implications for the literature on emotion recognition are discussed.

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  1. Department of Psychology, McGill University, 1205 avenue Dr. Penfield, Montreal, QC, H3A 1B1, Canada

    Michele Morningstar, Melanie A. Dirks & Shiming Huang

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  1. Michele Morningstar
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  2. Melanie A. Dirks
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Correspondence to Michele Morningstar.

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Table 3 ANOVA on the effect of age, gender, expression, sentence, and take on vocal cues
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Morningstar, M., Dirks, M.A. & Huang, S. Vocal Cues Underlying Youth and Adult Portrayals of Socio-emotional Expressions. J Nonverbal Behav 41, 155–183 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-017-0250-7

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