How Psychological Stress Affects Emotional Prosody

We explored how experimentally induced psychological stress affects the production and recognition of vocal emotions. In Study 1a, we demonstrate that sentences spoken by stressed speakers are judged by naive listeners as sounding more stressed than sentences uttered by non-stressed speakers. In Study 1b, negative emotions produced by stressed speakers are generally less well recognized than the same emotions produced by non-stressed speakers. Multiple mediation analyses suggest this poorer recognition of negative stimuli was due to a mismatch between the variation of volume voiced by speakers and the range of volume expected by listeners. Together, this suggests that the stress level of the speaker affects judgments made by the receiver. In Study 2, we demonstrate that participants who were induced with a feeling of stress before carrying out an emotional prosody recognition task performed worse than non-stressed participants. Overall, findings suggest detrimental effects of induced stress on interpersonal sensitivity

Multiple mediation model for sentences voiced in negative emotions.

<p>Dotted paths are non-significant.</p

Emotion Recognition Rates.

<p>Emotion Recognition Rates.</p

Lens model of vocal emotion expressions.

<p>The model describes the relationship between speakers’ production of vocal cues and listeners’ utilization of these cues.</p

Acoustic Analysis Results.

<p>Acoustic Analysis Results.</p

Emotion Recognition Rates.

<p>Emotion Recognition Rates.</p