The role of the age and gender, and the complexity of the syntactic unit in the perception of affective emotions in voice.
Baiba Trinite, Anita Zdanovica, Daiga Kurme and 3 others
PMID 39046026WHAT IT FOUND
Latvian listeners recognized angry voices at 84.9%, happy voices at 67.4%, and neutral voices at 73.2%.
Older listeners were less accurate for angry and happy voices. Phrases helped angry recognition; paragraphs helped happy and neutral recognition.
Key findings
01Listeners identified angry voice samples at 84.9%, happy samples at 67.4%, and neutral samples at 73.2%. The study found a significant difference only between angry and happy recognition.
02Listener age was associated with recognition accuracy, but gender was not; females rated anger and happiness more intensely than males.
03Utterance length changed recognition: angry voices had median accuracy 95.0% in phrases, while happy and neutral voices had median accuracy 80.0% and 90.0% in paragraphs.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used only 32 listeners and 10 actors, so it cannot support general conclusions about larger populations. All emotional voice samples were produced by professional actors following descriptions, not natural spontaneous emotion. The study tested only neutral, happy, and angry emotions in Latvian, so it says nothing about other emotions, languages, or clinical voice disorders. Participants were volunteers with normal hearing and no speech-science expertise, so findings may not apply to patients or professionals. The experiment required about one hour and 300 stimuli, which may affect sustained attention, especially for older listeners.
Declared interests
The study was funded by the Latvian Science Council (lzp-2021/1-0159). The supplied text does not state author conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that women are better at recognizing emotions. Gender differences in recognition accuracy were absent, and women only rated anger and happiness as more intense.