VOCAL EXPRESSION OF EMOTION - ACOUSTIC PROPERTIES OF SPEECH ARE ASSOCIATED WITH EMOTIONAL INTENSITY AND CONTEXT

Acoustic properties of speech likely provide external cues about inter nal emotional processes, a phenomenon called vocal expression of emoti on. Testing this supposition, we examined fundamental frequency (F-0) and two perturbation measures, jitter and shimmer, in short speech sam ples recorded from subjects performing a lexical decision task. Statis tically significant differences were found between baseline and on-tas k values and as interaction effects involving differences in trait lev els of emotional intensity and the proportion of success versus failur e feedback received. These results indicate that acoustic properties o f speech can be used to index emotional processes and that characteris tic differences in emotional intensity may mediate vocal expression of emotion.