Topic > Intersocial communication and its paralinguistic aspects

In speech, the main area of ​​intersocial communication, understanding can only work if all essential aspects of a message are successfully transmitted. In addition to the linguistic content of an expression, paralinguistic aspects also play a role, such as the emotional state of the speaker, his or her gender, approximate age, etc. This data will allow the recipient to interpret the context of the situation. It is the prosody of an utterance that will tell the emotion that the speaker attributes to the message. However, an attentive listener could perceive more information by being able to identify emotional contents that the speaker does not necessarily intend to convey. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Addressing some aspects of the complex question of how speech is affected by emotions, in this essay I refer to several articles but mainly focus on one, which deals with how psychosocial factors (in this case, psychological stress-induced experimentally) can influence the production and recognition of speech from both perspectives, that of the speaker and that of the recipient. I will refer to the study of interest as study 1 and the other two as studies 2 and 3 respectively, although it is important to note that they are completely independent of each other and differ in numerous aspects. The goal of Study 1 was to explore how stress-induced changes in the production and recognition of vocalized emotions, and the hypothesis was that stress should have some effect on it. The data were acoustically analyzed and subjected to in-depth statistical analysis in order to find correlations and meanings between the factors. The study was divided into two parts. In the first part, the results showed that naive listeners (neither professional nor trained actors) could detect that naive speakers under stress seemed more stressed. Furthermore, it was shown that negative emotions produced by stressed speakers were not recognized as easily as the same emotions produced by non-stressed speakers and even positive emotions produced by stress-induced speakers were recognized more easily than negative emotions from the same group. The reason for this, as proposed in the article, may be that the loudness change produced by the speakers did not correspond to the expectations of the loudness change expected by the perceivers. Another theory stated in the article was that the speakers, suffering from mild stress, found it relieving to express positive emotions in this situation. In any case, this result demonstrated that the judgment expressed by the recipient is influenced by the speaker's stress level. In the second half of the study the participants who would then have to carry out a prosody recognition task (speakers had to read the sentences in an angry, disgusted, pleasantly surprised, scared, happy and neutral tone of voice, offering the recipients a wide range of what to recognize emotions from) were induced with the feeling of stress before the task and subsequently performed worse than participants who were not under stress. Therefore, overall the results indicate that interpersonal sensitivity in communication deteriorates due to induced stress. Study 2 hypothesized that emotion influences speech recognition accuracy (particularly for the artificial speech recognition domain), and in their acoustic investigation they mainly focused on pitch as an important parameter indicating differences. Furthermore, the study aimed toexplore how emotional states influence continuous speech recognition performance (different from study 1, here content recognition accuracy was in question) and found that angry, happy and questioning sentences lead to lower recognition accuracy compared to to the model of the neutral sentence. In Study 2, speakers were trained to pronounce the sentences in a particular emotional state, whereas in Study 1 they were not. Briefly summarizing the results, emotional states lead to variations in speech parameters and this causes a problem for speech recognition systems that use baseline models. Therefore it is important to find out how emotion influences the parameters and to systematize such changes, which however remains a difficult task due to the complexity of a large database needed and other systematic difficulties. Study 3, in brief, was another analysis of variability in articulation in emotional speech. In this study it was considered that studying acoustics was not sufficient when other paralinguistic factors such as speaker, linguistic conditions and types of emotion could influence so much. Therefore, direct measurements from the articulatory system using electromagnetic articulation and real-time magnetic resonance imaging were used which made the static and dynamic processes of the organs visible. A part of the videos was collected into a freely accessible corpus for further systematic research on articulation and prosody (all data taken from professional actors and actresses). The target emotions here were anger, happiness, sadness, and neutrality. There are some interesting details to add about Study 1. Given that the participants were inexperienced speakers who needed to speak different sentences giving them the tone of different emotions, one could argue that the data cannot be accurately applied to life emotional prosody real. However, the speakers were asked to imagine themselves in situations where they felt the emotions in question before expressing them, which could have improved their performance enormously, but remains speculative. To induce stress in the participants, a subpart of the Trier social stress test was used, in which the participant had to solve an arithmetic task, counting backwards exactly from 1022 in steps of 13. If an incorrect answer was given, the participant we had to start again from 1022. The stress level was measured subjectively on a scale of 0 to 15. Some participants were not susceptible to priming since stress induction did not work in their cases. Their data were excluded from the analysis. Regarding the selection of test material, there were no previous guidelines on how emotional sentences should be spoken by stressed versus non-stressed speakers. For this reason the material was classified statistically based on 7 standard acoustic parameters, namely the average, minimum and maximum pitch, the average, minimum and maximum intensity and the average duration. By analyzing the acoustic information on the pitch parameter in Study 1, it was clearly demonstrated that angry, scared or happy expressions are characterized by a higher pitch and a louder voice. Sad expressions are spoken using a lower tone, a reduced volume, and generally more slowly. Stressed speakers who expressed disgust, pleasant surprise, or happiness used a reduced tone range. There are references to other studies that suggest that women, in general, when speaking in stressful situations, are analyzed to use lower pitch and intensity and do not use as much of their aerodynamic capacity as men. As in the present study 1,.