Sounds like a fight: listeners can infer behavioural contexts from spontaneous nonverbal vocalisations.

When we hear another person laugh or scream, can we tell the kind of situation they are in - for example, whether they are playing or fighting? Nonverbal expressions are theorised to vary systematically across behavioural contexts. Perceivers might be sensitive to these putative systematic mappings and thereby correctly infer contexts from others' vocalisations. Here, in two pre-registered experiments, we test the prediction that listeners can accurately deduce production contexts (e.g. being tickled, discovering threat) from spontaneous nonverbal vocalisations, like sighs and grunts. In Experiment 1, listeners (total n = 3120) matched 200 nonverbal vocalisations to one of 10 contexts using yes/no response options. Using signal detection analysis, we show that listeners were accurate at matching vocalisations to nine of the contexts. In Experiment 2, listeners (n = 337) categorised the production contexts by selecting from 10 response options in a forced-choice task. By analysing unbiased hit rates, we show that participants categorised all 10 contexts at better-than-chance levels. Together, these results demonstrate that perceivers can infer contexts from nonverbal vocalisations at rates that exceed that of random selection, suggesting that listeners are sensitive to systematic mappings between acoustic structures in vocalisations and behavioural contexts.

Universal interpretations of vocal music.

Despite the variability of music across cultures, some types of human songs share acoustic characteristics. For example, dance songs tend to be loud and rhythmic, and lullabies tend to be quiet and melodious. Human perceptual sensitivity to the behavioral contexts of songs, based on these musical features, suggests that basic properties of music are mutually intelligible, independent of linguistic or cultural content. Whether these effects reflect universal interpretations of vocal music, however, is unclear because prior studies focus almost exclusively on English-speaking participants, a group that is not representative of humans. Here, we report shared intuitions concerning the behavioral contexts of unfamiliar songs produced in unfamiliar languages, in participants living in Internet-connected industrialized societies (n = 5,516 native speakers of 28 languages) or smaller-scale societies with limited access to global media (n = 116 native speakers of three non-English languages). Participants listened to songs randomly selected from a representative sample of human vocal music, originally used in four behavioral contexts, and rated the degree to which they believed the song was used for each context. Listeners in both industrialized and smaller-scale societies inferred the contexts of dance songs, lullabies, and healing songs, but not love songs. Within and across cohorts, inferences were mutually consistent. Further, increased linguistic or geographical proximity between listeners and singers only minimally increased the accuracy of the inferences. These results demonstrate that the behavioral contexts of three common forms of music are mutually intelligible cross-culturally and imply that musical diversity, shaped by cultural evolution, is nonetheless grounded in some universal perceptual phenomena.

Display rules differ between positive emotions: Not all that feels good looks good.

People do not always show how they feel; norms often dictate when to display emotions and to whom. Norms about emotional expressions-known as display rules-are weaker for happiness than for negative emotions, suggesting that expressing positive emotions is generally seen as acceptable. But does it follow that all positive emotions can always be shown to everyone? To answer this question, we mapped out context-specific display rules for 8 positive emotions: gratitude, admiration, interest, relief, amusement, feeling moved, sensory pleasure, and triumph. In four studies with participants from five countries (n = 1,181), two consistent findings emerged. First, display rules differed between positive emotions. Weaker display rules were found for gratitude, interest, and amusement, whereas stronger display rules were found for sensory pleasure, feeling moved, and to some degree triumph. Second, contextual features-such as expresser location and perceiver relationship-both substantially influenced display rules for positive emotions, with perceiver relationship having a greater impact on display rules than expresser location. Our findings demonstrate that some positive emotions are less acceptable to express than others and highlight the central role of context in influencing display rules even for emotions that feel good. In so doing, we provide the first map of expression norms for specific positive emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Adversity, emotion, and resilience among Syrian refugees in the Netherlands.

BACKGROUND: Syrian refugees comprise the vast majority of refugees in the Netherlands. Although some research has been carried out on factors promoting refugee resilience, there have been few empirical studies on the resilience of Syrian refugees. METHOD: We used a qualitative method to understand adversity, emotion, and the factors contributing to resilience in Syrian refugees. We interviewed eighteen adult Syrian refugees residing in the Netherlands and used thematic analysis to identify the themes. RESULTS: We identified themes and organized them into three main parts describing the challenges (pre and post-resettlement), key emotions pertaining to those experiences, and resilience factors. We found six primary protective factors internally and externally promoting participants' resilience: future orientation, coping strategies, social support, opportunities, religiosity, and cultural identity. In addition, positive emotions constituted a key feature of refugees' resilience. CONCLUSION: The results highlight the challenges and emotions in each stage of the Syrian refugees' journey and the multitude of factors affecting their resilience. Our findings on religiosity and maintaining cultural identity suggest that resilience can be enhanced on a cultural level. So it is worth noting these aspects when designing prevention or intervention programs for Syrian refugees.

How emotions, relationships, and culture constitute each other: advances in social functionalist theory.

Social Functionalist Theory (SFT) emerged 20 years ago to orient emotion science to the social nature of emotion. Here we expand upon SFT and make the case for how emotions, relationships, and culture constitute one another. First, we posit that emotions enable the individual to meet six "relational needs" within social interactions: security, commitment, status, trust, fairness, and belongingness. Building upon this new theorising, we detail four principles concerning emotional experience, cognition, expression, and the cultural archiving of emotion. We conclude by considering the bidirectional influences between culture, relationships, and emotion, outlining areas of future inquiry.

Perception of group membership from spontaneous and volitional laughter.

Laughter is a ubiquitous social signal. Recent work has highlighted distinctions between spontaneous and volitional laughter, which differ in terms of both production mechanisms and perceptual features. Here, we test listeners' ability to infer group identity from volitional and spontaneous laughter, as well as the perceived positivity of these laughs across cultures. Dutch (n = 273) and Japanese (n = 131) participants listened to decontextualized laughter clips and judged (i) whether the laughing person was from their cultural in-group or an out-group; and (ii) whether they thought the laughter was produced spontaneously or volitionally. They also rated the positivity of each laughter clip. Using frequentist and Bayesian analyses, we show that listeners were able to infer group membership from both spontaneous and volitional laughter, and that performance was equivalent for both types of laughter. Spontaneous laughter was rated as more positive than volitional laughter across the two cultures, and in-group laughs were perceived as more positive than out-group laughs by Dutch but not Japanese listeners. Our results demonstrate that both spontaneous and volitional laughter can be used by listeners to infer laughers' cultural group identity. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)'.

Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact.

Research on within-individual modulation of vocal cues is surprisingly scarce outside of human speech. Yet, voice modulation serves diverse functions in human and nonhuman nonverbal communication, from dynamically signalling motivation and emotion, to exaggerating physical traits such as body size and masculinity, to enabling song and musicality. The diversity of anatomical, neural, cognitive and behavioural adaptations necessary for the production and perception of voice modulation make it a critical target for research on the origins and functions of acoustic communication. This diversity also implicates voice modulation in numerous disciplines and technological applications. In this two-part theme issue comprising 21 articles from leading and emerging international researchers, we highlight the multidisciplinary nature of the voice sciences. Every article addresses at least two, if not several, critical topics: (i) development and mechanisms driving vocal control and modulation; (ii) cultural and other environmental factors affecting voice modulation; (iii) evolutionary origins and adaptive functions of vocal control including cross-species comparisons; (iv) social functions and real-world consequences of voice modulation; and (v) state-of-the-art in multidisciplinary methodologies and technologies in voice modulation research. With this collection of works, we aim to facilitate cross-talk across disciplines to further stimulate the burgeoning field of voice modulation. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)'.

Superior Communication of Positive Emotions Through Nonverbal Vocalisations Compared to Speech Prosody.

The human voice communicates emotion through two different types of vocalizations: nonverbal vocalizations (brief non-linguistic sounds like laughs) and speech prosody (tone of voice). Research examining recognizability of emotions from the voice has mostly focused on either nonverbal vocalizations or speech prosody, and included few categories of positive emotions. In two preregistered experiments, we compare human listeners' (total n = 400) recognition performance for 22 positive emotions from nonverbal vocalizations (n = 880) to that from speech prosody (n = 880). The results show that listeners were more accurate in recognizing most positive emotions from nonverbal vocalizations compared to prosodic expressions. Furthermore, acoustic classification experiments with machine learning models demonstrated that positive emotions are expressed with more distinctive acoustic patterns for nonverbal vocalizations as compared to speech prosody. Overall, the results suggest that vocal expressions of positive emotions are communicated more successfully when expressed as nonverbal vocalizations compared to speech prosody. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10919-021-00375-1.

Sustained Stress Reduces the Age Advantages in Emotional Experience of Older Adults: Commentary on Carstensen et al. (2020).

Older age is characterized by more positive and less negative emotional experience. Recent work by Carstensen et al. (2020) demonstrated that the age advantages in emotional experience have persisted during the COVID-19 pandemic. In two studies, we replicated and extended this work. In Study 1, we conducted a large-scale test of the robustness of Carstensen and colleagues' findings using data from 23,350 participants in 63 countries. Our results confirm that age advantages in emotions have persisted during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Study 2, we directly compared the age advantages before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in a within-participants study (N = 4,370). We found that the age advantages in emotions decreased during the pandemic. These findings are consistent with theoretical proposals that the age advantages reflect older adults' ability to avoid situations that are likely to cause negative emotions, which is challenging under conditions of sustained unavoidable stress.

The ontogeny of human laughter.

Human adult laughter is characterized by vocal bursts produced predominantly during exhalation, yet apes laugh while exhaling and inhaling. The current study investigated our hypothesis that laughter of human infants changes from laughter similar to that of apes to increasingly resemble that of human adults over early development. We further hypothesized that the more laughter is produced on the exhale, the more positively it is perceived. To test these predictions, novice (n = 102) and expert (phonetician, n = 15) listeners judged the extent to which human infant laughter (n = 44) was produced during inhalation or exhalation, and the extent to which they found the laughs pleasant and contagious. Support was found for both hypotheses, which were further confirmed in two pre-registered replication studies. Likely through social learning and the anatomical development of the vocal production system, infants' initial ape-like laughter transforms into laughter similar to that of adult humans over the course of ontogeny.

Emotion Recognition from Realistic Dynamic Emotional Expressions Cohere with Established Emotion Recognition Tests: A Proof-of-Concept Validation of the Emotional Accuracy Test.

Individual differences in understanding other people's emotions have typically been studied with recognition tests using prototypical emotional expressions. These tests have been criticized for the use of posed, prototypical displays, raising the question of whether such tests tell us anything about the ability to understand spontaneous, non-prototypical emotional expressions. Here, we employ the Emotional Accuracy Test (EAT), which uses natural emotional expressions and defines the recognition as the match between the emotion ratings of a target and a perceiver. In two preregistered studies (Ntotal = 231), we compared the performance on the EAT with two well-established tests of emotion recognition ability: the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT) and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). We found significant overlap (r > 0.20) between individuals' performance in recognizing spontaneous emotions in naturalistic settings (EAT) and posed (or enacted) non-verbal measures of emotion recognition (GERT, RMET), even when controlling for individual differences in verbal IQ. On average, however, participants reported enjoying the EAT more than the other tasks. Thus, the current research provides a proof-of-concept validation of the EAT as a useful measure for testing the understanding of others' emotions, a crucial feature of emotional intelligence. Further, our findings indicate that emotion recognition tests using prototypical expressions are valid proxies for measuring the understanding of others' emotions in more realistic everyday contexts.

Perception and Evaluation of 23 Positive Emotions in Hong Kong and the Netherlands.

Positive emotions are linked to numerous benefits, but not everyone appreciates the same kinds of positive emotional experiences. We examine how distinct positive emotions are perceived and whether individuals' perceptions are linked to how societies evaluate those emotions. Participants from Hong Kong and Netherlands rated 23 positive emotions based on their individual perceptions (positivity, arousal, and socially engaging) and societal evaluations (appropriate, valued, and approved of). We found that (1) there were cultural differences in judgments about all six aspects of positive emotions; (2) positivity, arousal, and social engagement predicted emotions being positively regarded at the societal level in both cultures; and (3) that positivity mattered more for the Dutch participants, although arousal and social engagement mattered more in Hong Kong for societal evaluations. These findings provide a granular map of the perception and evaluation of distinct positive emotions in two cultures and highlight the role of cultures in the understanding how positive emotions are perceived and evaluated.

Culture shapes emotion perception from faces and voices: changes over development.

The perception of multisensory emotion cues is affected by culture. For example, East Asians rely more on vocal, as compared to facial, affective cues compared to Westerners. However, it is unknown whether these cultural differences exist in childhood, and if not, which processing style is exhibited in children. The present study tested East Asian and Western children, as well as adults from both cultural backgrounds, to probe cross-cultural similarities and differences at different ages, and to establish the weighting of each modality at different ages. Participants were simultaneously shown a face and a voice expressing either congruent or incongruent emotions, and were asked to judge whether the person was happy or angry. Replicating previous research, East Asian adults relied more on vocal cues than did Western adults. Young children from both cultural groups, however, behaved like Western adults, relying primarily on visual information. The proportion of responses based on vocal cues increased with age in East Asian, but not Western, participants. These results suggest that culture is an important factor in developmental changes in the perception of facial and vocal affective information.

Human listeners' perception of behavioural context and core affect dimensions in chimpanzee vocalizations.

Vocalizations linked to emotional states are partly conserved among phylogenetically related species. This continuity may allow humans to accurately infer affective information from vocalizations produced by chimpanzees. In two pre-registered experiments, we examine human listeners' ability to infer behavioural contexts (e.g. discovering food) and core affect dimensions (arousal and valence) from 155 vocalizations produced by 66 chimpanzees in 10 different positive and negative contexts at high, medium or low arousal levels. In experiment 1, listeners (n = 310), categorized the vocalizations in a forced-choice task with 10 response options, and rated arousal and valence. In experiment 2, participants (n = 3120) matched vocalizations to production contexts using yes/no response options. The results show that listeners were accurate at matching vocalizations of most contexts in addition to inferring arousal and valence. Judgments were more accurate for negative as compared to positive vocalizations. An acoustic analysis demonstrated that, listeners made use of brightness and duration cues, and relied on noisiness in making context judgements, and pitch to infer core affect dimensions. Overall, the results suggest that human listeners can infer affective information from chimpanzee vocalizations beyond core affect, indicating phylogenetic continuity in the mapping of vocalizations to behavioural contexts.

Different faces of empathy: Feelings of similarity disrupt recognition of negative emotions.

Empathizing with others is widely presumed to increase our understanding of their emotions. Little is known, however, about which empathic process actually help people recognize others' feelings more accurately. Here, we probed the relationship between emotion recognition and two empathic processes: spontaneously felt similarity (having had a similar experience) and deliberate perspective taking (focus on the other vs. oneself). We report four studies in which participants (total N = 803) watched videos of targets sharing genuine negative emotional experiences. Participants' multi-scalar ratings of the targets' emotions were compared with the targets' own emotion ratings. In Study 1 we found that having had a similar experience to what the target was sharing was associated with lower recognition of the target's emotions. Study 2 replicated the same pattern and in addition showed that making participants' own imagined reaction to the described event salient resulted in further reduced accuracy. Studies 3 and 4 were preregistered replications and extensions of Studies 1 and 2, in which we observed the same outcome using a different stimulus set, indicating the robustness of the finding. Moreover, Study 4 directly investigated the underlying mechanism of the observed effect. Findings showed that perceivers who have had a negative life experience similar to the emotional event described in the video felt greater personal distress after watching the video, which in part explained their reduced accuracy. These results provide the first demonstration that spontaneous empathy, evoked by similarity in negative experiences, may inhibit rather than increase our understanding of others' emotions.

Two facets of affective empathy: concern and distress have opposite relationships to emotion recognition.

Theories on empathy have argued that feeling empathy for others is related to accurate recognition of their emotions. Previous research that tested this assumption, however, has reported inconsistent findings. We suggest that this inconsistency may be due to a lack of consideration of the fact that empathy has two facets: empathic concern, namely the compassion for unfortunate others, and personal distress, the experience of discomfort in response to others' distress. We test the hypothesis that empathic concern is positively related to emotion recognition, whereas personal distress is negatively related to emotion recognition. Individual tendencies to respond with concern or distress were measured with the standard IRI (Interpersonal Reactivity Index) self-report questionnaire. Emotion recognition performance was assessed with three standard tests of nonverbal emotion recognition. Across two studies (total N = 431) anddifferent emotion recognition tests, we found that these two facets of affective empathy have opposite relations to recognition of facial expressions of emotions: empathic concern was positively related, while personal distress was negatively related, to accurate emotion recognition. These findings fit with existing motivational models of empathy, suggesting that empathic concern and personal distress have opposing impacts on the likelihood that empathy makes one a better emotion observer.

Good vibrations: A review of vocal expressions of positive emotions.

Researchers examining nonverbal communication of emotions are becoming increasingly interested in differentiations between different positive emotional states like interest, relief, and pride. But despite the importance of the voice in communicating emotion in general and positive emotion in particular, there is to date no systematic review of what characterizes vocal expressions of different positive emotions. Furthermore, integration and synthesis of current findings are lacking. In this review, we comprehensively review studies (N = 108) investigating acoustic features relating to specific positive emotions in speech prosody and nonverbal vocalizations. We find that happy voices are generally loud with considerable variability in loudness, have high and variable pitch, and are high in the first two formant frequencies. When specific positive emotions are directly compared with each other, pitch mean, loudness mean, and speech rate differ across positive emotions, with patterns mapping onto clusters of emotions, so-called emotion families. For instance, pitch is higher for epistemological emotions (amusement, interest, relief), moderate for savouring emotions (contentment and pleasure), and lower for a prosocial emotion (admiration). Some, but not all, of the differences in acoustic patterns also map on to differences in arousal levels. We end by pointing to limitations in extant work and making concrete proposals for future research on positive emotions in the voice.

What music makes us feel: At least 13 dimensions organize subjective experiences associated with music across different cultures.

What is the nature of the feelings evoked by music? We investigated how people represent the subjective experiences associated with Western and Chinese music and the form in which these representational processes are preserved across different cultural groups. US (n = 1,591) and Chinese (n = 1,258) participants listened to 2,168 music samples and reported on the specific feelings (e.g., "angry," "dreamy") or broad affective features (e.g., valence, arousal) that they made individuals feel. Using large-scale statistical tools, we uncovered 13 distinct types of subjective experience associated with music in both cultures. Specific feelings such as "triumphant" were better preserved across the 2 cultures than levels of valence and arousal, contrasting with theoretical claims that valence and arousal are building blocks of subjective experience. This held true even for music selected on the basis of its valence and arousal levels and for traditional Chinese music. Furthermore, the feelings associated with music were found to occupy continuous gradients, contradicting discrete emotion theories. Our findings, visualized within an interactive map (https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/∼acowen/music.html) reveal a complex, high-dimensional space of subjective experience associated with music in multiple cultures. These findings can inform inquiries ranging from the etiology of affective disorders to the neurological basis of emotion.

Cultural norms influence nonverbal emotion communication: Japanese vocalizations of socially disengaging emotions.

Nonverbal vocalizations of some emotions have been found to be recognizable both within and across cultures. However, East Asians tend to suppress socially disengaging emotions because of interdependent views on self-other relationships. Here we tested the possibility that norms in interdependent cultures around socially disengaging emotions may influence nonverbal vocal communication of emotions. Specifically, we predicted that East Asians' vocalizations of socially disengaging emotions would be less recognizable to Westerners than those of other emotions. To test this hypothesis, we performed a balanced cross-cultural experiment in which 30 Dutch and 30 Japanese listeners categorized and rated Dutch and Japanese vocalizations expressing nine emotions including anger and triumph, two socially disengaging emotions. The only condition for which recognition performance failed to exceed chance level was Dutch listeners' judgments of Japanese anger vocalizations, p = .302. The magnitude of the in-group advantage (i.e., enhanced recognition accuracy when producer and perceiver cultures match) was also largest for Japanese anger vocalizations out of all the 18 conditions investigated, p < .001. The second largest in-group advantage was obtained for Japanese triumph vocalizations, p < .001. In addition, Dutch listeners rated Japanese vocalizations of anger and triumph as less intense, negative/positive, and aroused than did Japanese listeners, ps < .001. Taken together, these findings suggest that East Asian-specific cultural norms of interpersonal relationships are associated with specificity in nonverbal vocal communication of socially disengaging emotions, especially anger, to the point that some signals can only be understood by individuals who are culturally familiar with them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Human emotional vocalizations can develop in the absence of auditory learning.

Are emotional expressions shaped by specialized innate mechanisms that guide learning, or do they develop exclusively from learning without innate preparedness? Here we test whether nonverbal affective vocalisations produced by bilaterally congenitally deaf adults contain emotional information that is recognisable to naive listeners. Because these deaf individuals have had no opportunity for auditory learning, the presence of such an association would imply that mappings between emotions and vocalizations are buffered against the absence of input that is typically important for their development and thus at least partly innate. We recorded nonverbal vocalizations expressing 9 emotions from 8 deaf individuals (435 tokens) and 8 matched hearing individuals (536 tokens). These vocalizations were submitted to an acoustic analysis and used in a recognition study in which naive listeners (n = 812) made forced-choice judgments. Our results show that naive listeners can reliably infer many emotional states from nonverbal vocalizations produced by deaf individuals. In particular, deaf vocalizations of fear, disgust, sadness, amusement, sensual pleasure, surprise, and relief were recognized at better-than-chance levels, whereas anger and achievement/triumph vocalizations were not. Differences were found on most acoustic features of the vocalizations produced by deaf as compared with hearing individuals. Our results suggest that there is an innate component to the associations between human emotions and vocalizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).