This study is concerned with the accuracy of affective communication by means of voice qualities, with a special focus on cross-cultural affective transmission. Spontaneous expressions of love, anger, sadness, and happiness, elicited from three English- and three French-speaking amateur actresses, were tape-recorded. The resulting tape was passed through an electronic filter to render it content-free. The subjects were 17 English-Canadian and 17 French-Canadian female Introductory Psychology students chosen from a larger group of volunteers on the basis of specific criterion responses to a biographical questionnaire, who received two marks for participation. Using the facilities of a language laboratory, the two groups of subjects were each exposed to the instrument on two occasions, in order to ensure its reliability. Subjects recorded their judgments concerning the affective stimuli on multiple-choice response forms, and the contrasts between the responses of the two groups were compared. The significantly greater accuracy of the English subjects on overall judgment of the emotions expressed by all speakers was in a direction contrary to the first hypothesis, which predicted a superiority in the decoding ability of the French-Canadian subjects for both English- and French-language affective stimuli. The second hypothesis, which postulated the superiority in encoding of emotions by the French-Canadian speakers, was also called into question by the finding that, while the French affective stimuli were identified by both English and French subjects with a similar level of accuracy, the English-speaking subjects were significantly more accurate than the French-speaking in judgments of the English emotional expressions. Sources of significant variations are discussed, with specific consideration of the contributions of differential efficacy of vocal cues in expressing specific emotions; individual differences in ability to encode affective communications by means of voice; and the possible influence of stereotypical modes of vocal communication of emotions, either innately formed or linked to socially learned cultural expressive modes, which may differentially influence the accuracy of affective communication across cultural/linguistic barriers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/10856 |
| Date | January 1978 |
| Creators | Hollander, Lynne. |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 121 p. |
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