Cultural Relativity in Perceiving Emotion From Vocalizations

Author:

Gendron Maria12,Roberson Debi3,van der Vyver Jacoba Marieta4,Barrett Lisa Feldman1256

Affiliation:

1. Affective Science Institute, Northeastern University

2. Department of Psychology, Northeastern University

3. Department of Psychology, University of Essex

4. School of Nursing and Public Health, University of Namibia

5. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, Massachusetts

6. Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School

Abstract

A central question in the study of human behavior is whether certain emotions, such as anger, fear, and sadness, are recognized in nonverbal cues across cultures. We predicted and found that in a concept-free experimental task, participants from an isolated cultural context (the Himba ethnic group from northwestern Namibia) did not freely label Western vocalizations with expected emotion terms. Responses indicate that Himba participants perceived more basic affective properties of valence (positivity or negativity) and to some extent arousal (high or low activation). In a second, concept-embedded task, we manipulated whether the target and foil on a given trial matched in both valence and arousal, neither valence nor arousal, valence only, or arousal only. Himba participants achieved above-chance accuracy only when foils differed from targets in valence only. Our results indicate that the voice can reliably convey affective meaning across cultures, but that perceptions of emotion from the voice are culturally variable.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Subject

General Psychology

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