Categorizing Emotion in Spoken Language Janine K. Fitzpatrick and John Logan

1. Categorizing Emotion in Spoken Language Janine K. Fitzpatrick and John Logan INTRODUCTION RESULTS • We understand emotion through spoken language via two types of cues: • • Semantic content (what is being said) • • Prosodic content (changes in pitch, amplitude and duration) • People with psychopathy display lower accuracy when identifying emotions from spoken words, particularly fear (Blair et al., 2002). • Bagley, Abramowitz and Kosson (2009): • •Psychopaths classified affective stimuli less accurately than non-psychopaths • No fear category in experimental design •  Pilot study indicated that even non-psychopathic listeners have trouble identifying fear from prosodic content alone • The current study aimed to replicate the findings of Bagley et al. (2009) among a non-psychopathic population with a category for fear • Results will be used to provide a normative sample for use in further research with psychopathic population Figure 2. Relationship between SRP-III score and response accuracy for sentences expressing fear in the semantic condition, r = -.36. DISCUSSION Figure 1. Mean accuracy for sentence categorization by emotion in semantic and prosodic conditions. Error bars represent ±1 standard error of the mean. Table 1 Mean categorization accuracy of high and low SRP-III participants by emotion and condition (SD) • The ratings task depends on the perception and categorization of emotional cues • Participants used more semantic cues when identifying happiness, sadness and fear in speech; more prosodic cues for anger • Next step: analyze confusion data for multidimensional scale solution • Even subclinical levels of psychopathy may be implicated in deficits in processing emotional language; Dysfunctional fear hypothesis: less adverse arousal to punishment (Blair et al., 2005)? • Future iterations will examine categorization accuracy within psychopathic population METHOD Participants •36 monolingual English-speaking Carleton undergraduate students •All are non-psychopathic (as measured by the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale SRP-II; Williams, Paulhus, & Hare, 2007) Ratings Task •Total 384 sentences (18-20 in each emotion category spoken in English and French; 4 speakers) Participants rate affect by choosing from 5 emotion categories 7-point intensity scale (1=low intensity; 4=moderate intensity; 7=high intensity) Design •Semantic condition: English sentences produced with neutral prosody (no prosodic cues) •Prosodic condition: French sentences produced with appropriate prosodic cues (no semantic cues for monolingual English listeners) •2 male and 2 female speakers REFERENCES Bagley, A. D., Abramowitz, C.S., & Kosson, D.S. (2009). Vocal affect recognition and psychopathy: Converging findings across traditional and cluster analytic approaches to assessing the construct. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 118 (2), 388-398. Blair, J., Mitchell D.R., & Blair, K. (2005). The psychopath: Emotion and the brain. London: Blackwell Publishing Professional. Blair, R.J.R., Mitchell, D.G.V., Richell, R.A., Kelly, S., & Leonard, A. (2002). Turning a deaf ear to fear: Impaired recognition of vocal affect in psychopathic individuals. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 111 (4), 682-686. Scherer, K. R., Johnstone, T., & Klasmeyer, G. (2003). Vocal expression of emotion. In R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer, and H. Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of the Affective Sciences. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, K., & Paulhus D. (2002). Factor structure of the Self-Report Psychopathy scale (SRP-II) in non-forensic samples. Personality and Individual Differences, 37, 765-778. Note. ** p < .01 for low and high SRP-III group comparisons.