A COMPARISON OF CONTENT-MASKING PROCEDURES FOR OBTAINING JUDGMENTS OFDISCRETE AFFECTIVE STATES

The purpose of this article is to investigate observers' use of acoust ic cues to arrive at judgments of the speaker's affective state and to address current methodological limitations. Ninety-nine female underg raduates rated the level of excitement, happiness, and anger of speech stimuli under three content-masking procedures: low-pass filtering, r andom splicing, and reiterant speech. Each procedure preserves some fo rms of acoustic information while disrupting or degrading others. As p redicted, the content-masking procedures generated bias in observers' affective ratings. Results are discussed in terms of the efficacy of t he content-masking procedures and implications for the study of acoust ic cues to speaker affect.