Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalizations

Abstract

Emotional signals are crucial for sharing important information, with conspecifics, for example, to warn humans of danger. Humans use a range of different cues to communicate to others how they feel, including facial, vocal, and gestural signals. We examined the recognition of nonverbal emotional vocalizations, such as screams and laughs, across two dramatically different cultural groups. Western participants were compared to individuals from remote, culturally isolated Namibian villages. Vocalizations communicating the so-called "basic emotions" (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) were bidirectionally recognized. In contrast, a set of additional emotions was only recognized within, but not across, cultural boundaries. Our findings indicate that a number of primarily negative emotions have vocalizations that can be recognized across cultures, while most positive emotions are communicated with culture-specific signals.

Fig. 1.

Participant watching the experimenter play a stimulus (Upper) and indicating her response (Lower).

Fig. 2.

Recognition performance (out of four) for each emotion category, within and across cultural groups. Dashed lines indicate chance levels (50%). Abbreviations: ach, achievement; amu, amusement; ang, anger; dis, disgust; fea, fear; ple, sensual pleasure; rel, relief; sad, sadness; and sur, surprise. (A) Recognition of each category of emotional vocalizations for stimuli from a different cultural group for Himba (light bars) and English (dark bars) listeners. (B) Recognition of each category of emotional vocalizations for stimuli from their own group for Himba (light bars) and English (dark bars) listeners.

Fig. 3.

Group averages (out of four) for recognition across all emotion categories for each set of stimuli, for Himba (black line) and English (gray line) listeners. Error bars denote standard errors.