Vocal Expression of Emotion: Acoustic Properties of Speech Are Associated With Emotional Intensity and Context

Abstract

Acoustic properties of speech likely provide external cues about internal emotional processes, a phenomenon called vocal expression of emotion Testing this supposition, we examined fundamental frequency (F₀) and two perturbation measures, jitter and shimmer, in short speech samples recorded from subjects performing a lexical decision task Statistically significant differences were found between baseline and on-task values and as interaction effects involving differences in trait levels of emotional intensity and the proportion of success versus failure feedback received These results indicate that acoustic properties of speech can be used to index emotional processes and that characteristic differences in emotional intensity may mediate vocal expression of emotion