Emotional cues, emotional signals, and their contrasting effects on listener valence

Smith and Harper[17] documented a considerable amount of animal sounds, and they found that the signals that had intentions to communicate (e.g. courtship display or defensive threatening posturing) were most often multimodal signals. This results as these signals are meant to be reliable and of benefit to both the sender and the receiver of the signal, otherwise they would cease to have the intended effect of communication. In contrast with signals, animal cues are much more commonly unimodal as they are unintentional by the sender.In my research, I investigate whether subjects exhibit different magnitudes of emotional valence responses between multimodal haptic and audio sources to unimodal audio sources, and whether there are divergences between the different types of emotions presented. Some emotions are more strongly intentional signals (e.g. happiness, fear or grief) while others are more emotional cues (e.g. sadness or calmness). My hypothesis is that musical and sound stimuli that are mimetic of emotional signals should combine to elicit a stronger response when presented as a multimodal stimulus as opposed to as a unimodal stimulus, whereas musical or sound stimuli that are mimetic of emotional cues interact in less clear and less cohesive manners with their corresponding haptic signals.For my investigations, subjects listen to samples from the International Affective Digital Sounds Library[2] and selected musical works on speakers in combination with a tactile transducer attached to their chair. The listening sessions are recorded on EEG supported by SCR, respiratory rate, heart rate and subject feedback responses