Incremental perception of acted and real emotional speech. Interspeech

This paper1 reports on an experiment using the gating paradigm to test the recognition speed for various emotional expressions from a speaker’s face. In a perception experiment, subjects were presented with video clips of speakers who displayed negative or positive emotions, which were either acted or real. The clips were shown in successive segments (gates) of increasing duration. Results show that subjects are surprisingly accurate in their recognition of the various emotions, as they already reach high recognition scores in the first gate (after only 160 milliseconds). Interestingly, the recognition speed is faster for positive than negative emotions, in line with comparable valency effects reported by Leppänen and Hietanen (2003). Finally, the gating results confirm earlier findings that acted emotions are perceived as more intense than true emotions (Wilting et al., 2006), as the former get more extreme recognition scores than the latter, already after a short period of exposure. Index Terms: incremental perception, gating paradigm, emotional speech, facial expressions, Velten techniqu