ArticleScientific reports2021
The paradoxical role of emotional intensity in the perception of vocal affect.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Interpreting the Intensity of Vocal Emotions Across Cultures.Scandinavian journal of psychology · 2026Article
- Intensity-dependent topographical expansion of sensory representations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Music is a distinct perceptual category with subjective grounds.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- A neurofunctional signature of affective arousal generalizes across valence domains and distinguishes subjective experience from autonomic reactivity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- CNEV: A corpus of Chinese nonverbal emotional vocalizations with a database of emotion category, valence, arousal, and gender.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Recognition of emotions in German laughter across cultures.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The human pupil and face encode sound affect and provide objective signatures of tinnitus and auditory hypersensitivity disorders.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- ReCANVo: A database of real-world communicative and affective nonverbal vocalizations.Scientific data · 2023Article
- Audio-Tokens: A toolbox for rating, sorting and comparing audio samples in the browser.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- The heavy-tailed valence hypothesis: the human capacity for vast variation in pleasure/pain and how to test it.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Perception and classification of emotions in nonsense speech: Humans versus machines.PloS one · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Vocalizations including laughter, cries, moans, or screams constitute a potent source of information about the affective states of others. It is typically conjectured that the higher the intensity of the expressed emotion, the better the classification of affective information. However, attempts to map the relation between affective intensity and inferred meaning are controversial. Based on a newly developed stimulus database of carefully validated non-speech expressions ranging across the entire intensity spectrum from low to peak, we show that the intuition is false. Based on three experiments (N = 90), we demonstrate that intensity in fact has a paradoxical role. Participants were asked to rate and classify the authenticity, intensity and emotion, as well as valence and arousal of the wide range of vocalizations. Listeners are clearly able to infer expressed intensity and arousal; in contrast, and surprisingly, emotion category and valence have a perceptual sweet spot: moderate and strong emotions are clearly categorized, but peak emotions are maximally ambiguous. This finding, which converges with related observations from visual experiments, raises interesting theoretical challenges for the emotion communication literature.
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