Emotion inferences from vocal expression correlate across languages and cultures

Whereas the perception of emotion from facial expression has been extensive ly studied cross-culturally, little is known about judges' ability to infer emotion from vocal cues. This article reports the results from a study con ducted in nine countries in Europe, the United States, and Asia on vocal em otion portrayals of anger, sadness, fear, joy, and neutral voice as produce d by professional German actors. Data show an overall accuracy of 66% acros s all emotions and countries. Although accuracy was substantially better th an chance, there were sizable differences ranging from 74% in Germany to 52 % in Indonesia. However, patterns of confusion were very similar across all countries. These data suggest the existence of similar inference rules fro m vocal expression across cultures. Generally, accuracy decreased with incr easing language dissimilarity from German in spite of the use of language-f ree speech samples. It is concluded that culture- and language-specific par alinguistic patterns may influence the decoding process.