Sumi Shigeno | PubMed Health

PubMed2004

[Recognition of vocal expression of emotion and its acoustic attributes].

The vocal expression of emotion was examined with both an auditory experiment and objective acoustic analyses. In the auditory experiment the stimuli were words or short sentences with six basic emotions expressed by two actors. Forty-five undergraduate and graduate students participated in the experiment. The results showed that the vocal expression of emotion was strongly identified, except in the case of fear, and that the six basic emotions could be plotted in a psychological space with two dimensions calculated from multidimensional scaling. The plot formed a roughly circular surface, with locations very similar to those of the facial expressions. One dimension was considered to represent the element of pleasantness-unpleasantness. The actors voices were then acoustically analyzed. The results suggested that the mean fundamental frequency (F0), the standard deviation (SD) of F0, and the SD of the energy are the important factors that define the characteristics of the vocal expression of emotions. To determine the most important parameter(s) and explain the two dimensions of the psychological space, canonical correlation analysis was conducted. The analysis indicated that F0 was correlated with the pleasantness-unpleasantness dimension.

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PubMed2002

Anchoring effects in audiovisual speech perception.

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether or not anchoring and selective adaptation induce basically the same psychological effects. The purpose of the first experiment is to show how an audiovisual anchor modifies the perception of consonant-vowel (CV) syllables. The anchors were two purely acoustical, two purely optical, and three audiovisual CV syllables. The results were compared with those of audiovisual speech selective-adaptation experiments conducted by Roberts and Summerfield [Percept. Psychophys. 30, 309-314 (1981)] and Saldaña and Rosenblum [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 95, 3658-3661 (1994)]. The audiovisual anchoring effects were found to be very similar to the audiovisual selective-adaptation effects, but the incompatible audiovisual anchor produced more auditory-based contrast than the purely acoustical anchor or the compatible audiovisual anchor. This difference in contrast had not been found in the previous selective-adaptation experiments. The second experiment was conducted to directly compare audiovisual anchoring and selective-adaptation effects under the same stimuli and with the same subjects. It was found that the compatible audiovisual syllable (AbVb) caused more contrast in selective adaptation than in anchoring, although the discrepant audiovisual syllable (AbVg) caused no difference between anchoring and selective adaptation. It was also found that the anchor AbVg caused more auditory-based contrast than the anchor AbVb. It is suggested that the mechanisms behind these results are different.

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