Development of procedures for rating posed emotional expressions across facial, prosodic, and lexical channels

A number of rating systems are available to evaluate emotional communicatio n in a single modality. The main purpose of this study was to develop proce dures to train human raters to evaluate posed expressions of emotion across three different channels of communication, i.e., facial, prosodic/intonati onal, and lexical/verbal. These procedures were used to evaluate posed emot ional expressions produced by individuals with unilateral brain lesions fro m stroke. Posers in this preliminary report were two right brain-damaged, t wo left brain-damaged, and two normal control right-handed adults who were matched on demographic and neurological factors. Eight emotional expression s, both positive and negative, were produced in three channels and rated fo r intensity, pleasantness, and category accuracy. 15 normal adults served a s raters, five per channel. The rating procedures were comparable across ch annels, with analogous properties, and yielded substantial interrater agree ment. In this small sample of posers, it was observed that the expressions of the right brain-damaged group were rated as the least accurate and thos e of the left brain-damaged group as the most intense. When patterns of ind ividual performance across the channels were examined, performance was quie t consistent for the normal controls yet variable for the right brain-damag ed persons. These observations are in keeping with the notion that patients with right hemisphere pathology have difficulty in emotional communication . In summary, these findings suggest that comparison of emotional expressio ns across multiple channels is feasible.