The time course of emotion recognition in speech and music

The auditory gating paradigm was adopted to study how much acoustic information is needed to recognize emotions from speech prosody and music performances. In Study 1, brief utterances conveying ten emotions were segmented into temporally fine-grained gates and presented to listeners, whereas Study 2 instead used musically expressed emotions. Emotion recognition accuracy increased with increasing gate duration and generally stabilized after a certain duration, with different trajectories for different emotions. Above-chance accuracy was observed for ≤100 ms stimuli for anger, happiness, neutral, and sadness, and for ≤250 ms stimuli for most other emotions, for both speech and music. This suggests that emotion recognition is a fast process that allows discrimination of several emotions based on low-level physical characteristics. The emotion identification points, which reflect the amount of information required for stable recognition, were shortest for anger and happiness for both speech and music, but recognition took longer to stabilize for music vs speech. This, in turn, suggests that acoustic cues that develop over time also play a role for emotion inferences (especially for music). Finally, acoustic cue patterns were positively correlated between speech and music, suggesting a shared acoustic code for expressing emotions.