Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

276 Understanding Intuitive Decision Making

Other tests of the role vocal attributes play in emotion perception fi nd that variations in speed

and pitch tend to have the strongest infl uence on audience impressions. Audiences interpret

moderate pitch variations in a speaker’s voice as an indication of sadness, disgust, and boredom.

They interpret a rising pitch and extreme pitch variations as indications of happiness, interest,

and fear.^220

Interestingly, members of one culture can recognize the vocal expressions of emotions made

by members of other cultures.^221 In a cross-cultural study of emotion perception, listeners from

different countries all associated a slow speaking rate and minimal pitch variation with sad-

ness. In contrast, they associated a fast speaking rate and greater pitch variation with anger and

fear, and a moderate speaking rate but greater pitch variation with happiness.^222 In another

cross-cultural study, people from nine countries, eight European and one Asian, listened to lan-

guage-free speech samples in which vocal cues expressed emotions. The listeners had an average

accuracy of 66% across all emotions and countries, with the emotion of anger being recognized

most accurately and joy least.^223 Apparently, speakers across the globe vocally express most emo-

tions in similar ways.^224

When listening to speech in their native language, listeners can recognize vocally expressed

emotion with accuracy rates that approach 70% for anger, fear, sadness, happiness, and ten-

derness.^225 Listeners generally recognize the emotions of sadness and anger best, followed by

fear.^226 Listeners can even tell whether their conversational partner on the telephone is smil-

ing.^227 However, native listeners’ recognition of vocal expressions of disgust is rarely above the

level of chance.

Brain Regions Activated. Neuroscientists fi nd that emotional prosody, as expressed in the

voices of emotional speakers, activates a region of the right temporal lobe, whereas nonemotional

prosody does not (see Figure 3.4 , p. 108).^228

Although audiences are able to infer emotions on the basis of the speaker’s tone of voice alone,

they are more accurate at inferring emotions when they can see the speaker’s facial expressions as

they speak.^229 In a study of multichannel cues to emotions, one group of students watched a video of

speakers shown from the shoulders up who expressed anger, sadness, happiness, fear, and indifference.

A second group watched the same video with the audio off. A third group listened to the video’s

audio track without watching the visual portion. The speakers read sentences whose content was

emotionally neutral, such as “Please pass the salt” and “John, there is a man at the door.” As expected,

the students were most accurate at identifying the speakers’ emotions when they could both see and

hear the speakers. Yet the students were only slightly less accurate when they could see but not hear

the speakers. When students heard the audio but could not see the speakers, their accuracy at iden-

tifying the speakers’ emotions decreased signifi cantly.^230

When both facial and vocal cues are available but incongruent, audiences will tend to base their

evaluations of the speaker’s emotions predominantly on facial cues.^231 Even so, audiences are fastest

and most accurate at identifying a speaker’s emotions when the speaker speaks in a tone of voice

that is emotionally congruent with their facial expression.^232

In addition to nonverbal cues, audiences use verbal cues to infer speakers’ emotions. One verbal

cue that indicates emotional arousal is a low frequency of unique words (i.e., a smaller vocabulary).

Greater numbers of unique words tend to indicate that speakers are experiencing only a low level

of arousal.^233 Another verbal behavior that indicates the speaker is emotionally aroused is a decrease

in speaking fl uency.

If the audience perceives that a speaker’s facial expressions are emotionally inconsistent with

their verbal message, the audience will make inferences based either on the speaker’s facial expres-

sions or on the speaker’s verbal message, but not on both together.^234 In those situations, perceptions