Cue utilization in emotion attribution from auditory stimuli

Electronically synthesized tone sequences with systematic manipulation of amplitude and pitch variation, pitch level and contour, tempo, envelope, and filtration were rated on emotional expressiveness. The results show that two-thirds to three-quarters of the variance in the emotion attributions can be explained by the manipulation of the acoustic cues, and that a linear model of the judges' cue utilization seems to be a good approximation to their response system. Implications for phylogenetic and ontogenetic aspects of the vocal expression of emotion and for the psychology of music are discussed