Emotional McGurk Effect

Speaking is a physiological process that manifests in the acoustic and in the optic domain and hence is audible and visible. These two modalities influence each other in perception. Under normal circumstances the speech information in both channels is coherent and complementary and integrated to a percept. But if the information is conflicting and nevertheless integrated then the percept in one of the modalities might be changed by the other modality. The experiment described here discovers that when the video of an utterance spoken in one emotion is dubbed with the audio of the utterance spoken in another emotion the perceived emotion might be a third – neither present in the auditory nor in the visual modality. 1