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.