Can you hear what I’m feeling?
It is usually easy to understand what kind of emotion others are feeling when we can see their facial expressions. But is it also easy to understand how they feel by only listening to their voices? Can we tell the differences between different emotions?
An interesting psychological research I participated in tested just that and made me question my own perception of various emotions.
The basic task I was assigned to was to listen to recordings of people saying the same message over and over again. If the message was “hello” for example, I would listen to several different people saying “hello” with different intonations. While listening to all the different versions of “Hello”, I had to rate what was the emotion that the speaker felt. There was a large range of emotions and I had to rate according to the following seven emotions: sadness, anger, fear, happiness, disgust, friendliness, and meanness. At the end of the study I also had to answer a questionnaire that was used to assess symptoms of depression and anxiety.
One of the main goal of this study was to find out whether people with different moods and behaviours would perceive other people’s vocal expressions differently. Other goals of the research included whether acoustically different emotions would be perceived differently and whether the age of the participant and the speaker influenced the performance. More precisely, I believe that people with depression or anxiety might have more difficulty in discerning the different emotional expressions because they might perceive everything according to their own feelings, such as perceiving more negativity.
At first it seemed like it wouldn’t be difficult to distinguish all the emotions, but after about 30 minutes of listening to the recordings, they seemed to become more and more difficult to distinguish with each other. I found the vocal expressions that were positive (happiness and friendliness) similar to each other, while the more negative ones (disgust and meanness) also very similar with each other.
The ambiguous understanding of the different emotions could have been a limitation to the study because not everyone has the same perception towards these kind of emotions, so it didn’t necessarily mean that people were making mistakes while they were rating of the expressions, but perhaps they would rate according to their own scale of emotions. I am also curious about whether my perception of different emotions was accurate or not.
I found this study very different from my previous experiences with psychological studies. Furthermore, I believe this test could also be used as a tool for researchers to assess if an individual might be experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety, and ultimately help them.
