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Biomedical subjects

K R Scherer

Publications and source records attributed to K R Scherer.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

Studying the dynamics of emotional expression using synthesized facial muscle movements.

Synthetic images of facial expression were used to assess whether judges can correctly recognize emotions exclusively on the basis of configurations of facial muscle movements. A first study showed that static, synthetic images modeled after a series of photographs that are widely used in facial expression research yielded recognition rates and confusion patterns comparable to posed photos. In a second study, animated synthetic images were used to examine whether schematic facial expressions consisting entirely of theoretically postulated facial muscle configurations can be correctly recognized. Recognition rates for the synthetic expressions were far above chance, and the confusion patterns were comparable to those obtained with posed photos. In addition, the effect of static versus dynamic presentation of the expressions was studied. Dynamic presentation increased overall recognition accuracy and reduced confusions between unrelated emotions.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Coping strategies, personality, and voice quality in patients with vocal fold nodules and polyps.

Emotional state affects the physiological mechanism involved in phonation. Differences in acoustical parameters of the voice under stress have been attributed to the coping mechanism used, which is based on the individual's perception of the situation. This study examines the relationship between coping strategies, personality, and voice in female subjects, ranging in age from 19.3-55.7 years, diagnosed with vocal nodules or polyps. The differences between coping strategies and personality are examined and compared with another group with no history of voice pathology. The relationship of personality and coping strategies to voice quality variables is reported. Results show that patients use emotional coping strategies more and cognitive coping strategies less than the comparison group. Type of voice pathology was found to be related to dominance, and a number of coping and personality variables were found to correlate significantly with voice quality.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1997

Voluntary facial expression of emotion: comparing congenitally blind with normally sighted encoders.

The ability of congenitally blind persons to produce voluntarily facial expressions of a number of emotions was compared with that of normally sighted individuals using both objective facial measurement and observer recognition. Results revealed that there were almost no significant differences between blind and sighted participants with respect to the number and type of facial action units produced. The portrayals of the blind participants were significantly more poorly recognized by observers than were those of the sighted participants (except for happiness). Correspondence analyses of the data showed differences between sighted and blind participants in the dimensional structure of the expressions (as based on the similarity among emotions with respect to both objective measurement and judgments). Overall, the data relavitize earlier conclusions on the facial expression of blind as compared with sighted persons and suggest specific hypotheses and procedures for further work in this area.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Acoustic profiles in vocal emotion expression.

Professional actors' portrayals of 14 emotions varying in intensity and valence were presented to judges. The results on decoding replicate earlier findings on the ability of judges to infer vocally expressed emotions with much-better-than-chance accuracy, including consistently found differences in the recognizability of different emotions. A total of 224 portrayals were subjected to digital acoustic analysis to obtain profiles of vocal parameters for different emotions. The data suggest that vocal parameters not only index the degree of intensity typical for different emotions but also differentiate valence or quality aspects. The data are also used to test theoretical predictions on vocal patterning based on the component process model of emotion (K.R. Scherer, 1986). Although most hypotheses are supported, some need to be revised on the basis of the empirical evidence. Discriminant analysis and jackknifing show remarkably high hit rates and patterns of confusion that closely mirror those found for listener-judges.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Expression of emotion in voice and music.

Vocal communication of emotion is biologically adaptive for socially living species and has therefore evolved in a phylogenetically continuous manner. Human affect bursts or interjections can be considered close parallels to animal affect vocalizations. The development of speech, unique to the human species, has relied on the voice as a carrier signal, and thus emotion effects on the voice become audible during speech. This article reviews (a) the evidence on listeners' ability to accurately identify a speaker's emotion from voice cues alone, (b) the research efforts trying to isolate the acoustic features that determine listener judgments, and (c) the findings on actual acoustic concomitants of a speaker's emotional state (real or portrayed by actors). Finally, based on speculations about the joint origin of speech and vocal music in nonlinguistic affect vocalizations, similarities of emotion expression in speech and music are discussed.

Affect↗
PubMed1995

Acoustic concomitants of emotional expression in operatic singing: the case of Lucia in Ardi gli incensi.

Two excerpts from the cadenza in Ardi gli incensi from Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor were acoustically analyzed for five recorded versions of the cadenza by Toti dal Monte, Maria Callas, Renata Scotto, Joan Sutherland, and Edita Gruberova. These acoustic parameters of the singing voices were correlated with preference and emotional expression judgments, based on pairwise comparisons, made by a group of experienced listener-judges. In addition to showing major differences in the voice quality of the five "dive" studied, the acoustic parameters suggested which vocal cues affect listener judgments. Two component scores, based on a factorial-dimensional analysis of the acoustic parameters, predicted 84% of the variance in the preference ratings.

Affect↗
PubMed1994

Evidence for universality and cultural variation of differential emotion response patterning.

The major controversy concerning psychobiological universality of differential emotion patterning versus cultural relativity of emotional experience is briefly reviewed. Data from a series of cross-cultural questionnaire studies in 37 countries on 5 continents are reported and used to evaluate the respective claims of the proponents in the debate. Results show highly significant main effects and strong effect sizes for the response differences across 7 major emotions (joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, shame, and guilt). Profiles of cross-culturally stable differences among the emotions with respect to subjective feeling, physiological symptoms, and expressive behavior are also reported. The empirical evidence is interpreted as supporting theories that postulate both a high degree of universality of differential emotion patterning and important cultural differences in emotion elicitation, regulation, symbolic representation, and social sharing.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1991

Stress specificities: differential effects of coping style, gender, and type of stressor on autonomic arousal, facial expression, and subjective feeling.

In this study several factors considered to be relevant in mediating stress arousal were experimentally manipulated. Ss selected for the coping styles anxiety denying, low anxiety, and high anxiety were confronted with both low- and high-arousal-inducing situations, using 2 different types of stressors (cognitive vs. emotional) in each case. Arousal reactions were measured in 3 response modalities: verbal report of subjective experience; nonverbal, nonvocal behavior; and physiological reactions. The results reveal complex interactions between type and degree of stress, coping style, and gender of Ss, confirming findings on vocal parameters of stress. These complex interactions are discussed with respect to the possibility that Ss' evaluation of situation characteristics may be influenced by coping styles and gender, resulting in differential reaction patterns.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1988

Vocal indicators of affective disorders.

Speech consists not only of linguistic elements such as phonemes - it also contains features which carry nonlinguistic information. These features, e.g. voice quality and prosody, either occur spontaneously and are related to the speaker's emotional and/or physiological state or are produced intentionally and related to the speaker's attitudes or interaction strategies (even though the latter often include features that are meant to appear as unintentional). Acoustic analysis of the human voice thus allows the identification of vocal correlates of the speaker's emotional and/or physiological state as well as of his social intentions.

Humans↗
PubMed1986

Recognition of emotion from vocal cues.

In two studies investigating the recognition of emotion from vocal cues, each of four emotions (joy, sadness, anger, and fear) was posed by an actress speaking the same, semantically neutral sentence. Judgments of emotion expressed in these segments were compared with similar judgments of voice-synthesized (Moog synthesizer) samples (study 1) or with three different alterations of the full-speech mode (study 2). Correct identification of the posed emotion was high in the full-speech samples. Voice-synthesized samples seemed to capture some cues promoting emotion recognition, but correct identification did not approach that of other segments. Recognition of emotion decreased, but not as dramatically as expected in each of the three alterations of the original samples.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

Effect of experimentally induced stress on vocal parameters.

In a factorially designed experiment the factors Mode of Stress (cognitive vs. emotional) and Degree of Stress (low vs. high) were studied in their effect on phonatory and articulatory processes during speech production in groups of male and female students (factor Sex) selected to represent three types of personality (factor Coping Style: low anxiety, high anxiety, anxiety denying). Using digital speech analysis procedures, mean F0, F0 floor, formant location, and spectral energy distribution were extracted from the experimental speech samples. Although mean F0 did not covary with stress manipulation, F0 floor of high-anxious and anxiety-denying subjects increased with stress, probably due to physiologically based changes in muscle tension. For articulatory processes, as measured through formant location and spectral composition, significant changes were found for females. For anxiety-denying female subjects, precision of articulation increased under cognitive stress and decreased under emotional stress. The results are interpreted in terms of differential susceptibility to stress.

Anxiety↗
PubMed1985

Vocal cues to deception: a comparative channel approach.

The study investigated the leakage potential of different voice and speech cues using a cue isolation and masking design. Speech samples taken from an earlier experiment were used in which 15 female students of nursing dissimulated negative affect produced by an unpleasant movie or told the truth about positive affect following a pleasant movie. Several groups of judges rated these speech samples in five conditions: (1) forward or clear, (2) electronic filtering, (3) random splicing, (4) backwards, (5) pitch inversion, (6) tone-silence sequences. The results show that vocal cues do indeed carry leakage information and that, as reflected in the differences among the conditions masking different types of cues respectively, voice quality cues may be centrally implicated. In addition, gender differences in decoding ability are discussed.

Affect↗
PubMed1983

The discrepant repressor: differentiation between low anxiety, high anxiety, and repression of anxiety by autonomic-facial-verbal patterns of behavior.

This study examined the notion that personality questionnaires can be used to predict different styles of coping with anxiety as expressed by individual differences in patterns of autonomic, verbal, and nonverbal reactions. In line with earlier modifications of the repression-sensitization concept, the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale (MAS) and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (SDS) were used to select four groups of 12 subjects each from a pool of 206 male students in Germany: low-anxious subjects (low MAS, low SDS), repressors (low MAS, high SDS), high-anxious subjects (high MAS, low SDS), and defensive high-anxious subjects (high MAS, high SDS). Several measures of autonomic arousal, facial activity, and self-reported affect were obtained during a potentially anxiety-arousing free-association task and during a number of control conditions, including a funny film. Significant differences in baseline-corrected heart rate and self-reported anxiety as well as rated facial anxiety all indicated that repressors exhibited a discrepancy between low self-reported anxiety and high heart rate and facial anxiety; low-anxious subjects reported an intermediate level of anxiety, although they showed low heart rate and facial anxiety; high-anxious subjects had consistently high values on all three variables; and the defensive high-anxious group showed an intermediate level of anxious responding. These group differences were specific to the task of freely associating to phrases of mixed (sexual, aggressive, neutral) content (but not to other experimental situations) and to self-reported anxiety (but not to other self-rated emotions or task difficult), indicating that they reflect individual differences in coping with anxiety.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1982

Vocal indicators of psychiatric treatment effects in depressives and schizophrenics.

Voice and speech changes as a result of clinical treatment for 17 depressive and 15 schizophrenic patients were investigated. Speech samples taken at interviews before and after treatment were analyzed with regard to f0, spectral energy distribution, and formant frequencies of vowels occurring in identical phonetical context. Both groups of patients showed a decrease in f0 after therapy, which was interpreted as a reduction of general arousal. Differential results with regard to spectral energy distribution suggested that the voice of depressives became more relaxed after therapy, but the opposite seemed to be true for schizophrenics. Significant formant changes obtained for the first formants of two vowels were interpreted as differences in the precision of articulation before and after therapy.

Depressive Disorder↗