The broad, long-term objectives for the proposed research are to provide an empirical foundation for """"""""vocal emotion"""""""" research and to contribute to an understanding of the biopsychological components of emotional processes in both unaffected and psychopathologically disturbed populations. The research described in the present proposal is essentially pilot work intended to address several procedural and methodological problems that should be resolved prior to the initiation of more rigorous, systematic research in vocal emotion. Discrete emotional states will be induced with visual stimuli, and speech samples will be recorded from subjects during their experience of these emotional states. Testing will be used to address methodological details, such as the timing of visual and speech stimulus presentations, as well as well as potentially more difficult measurement problems, such as the simultaneous recording of speech samples and facial EMG. The results of this pilot work will be used in a research program designed to characterize the acoustic properties of speech associated with positive and negative emotional states and to assess the validity of these associations by (a) comparing these acoustic measures with other established measures of emotional responding and (b) determining whether the acoustic indices associated with particular emotional states ar both perceptible to and interpretable by listeners. The results of research in vocal emotion have implications for diverse areas in mental health research, including the etiology and maintenance of anxious and depressed states, the cognitive and emotional development of children reared by depressed caretakers, and emotional processing in psychopaths.
