Recognizing vocal emotions in two unfamiliar languages: universal patterns versus cultural and prosodic proximity

This study investigates cross-cultural and cross-linguistic vocal emotion recognition by testing American English and French listeners (Listener Language) listening to vocal emotions produced in Dutch and Korean (Speaker Language). Both listener groups recognized all emotions above chance, except for Pride in Korean by American English listeners (0.08), thereby supporting the Universality hypothesis (Elfenbein, H. A. 2013. Nonverbal dialects and accents in facial expressions of emotion. Emotion Review 5(1). 90-96). However, we did not find consistent patterns for Cultural Proximity (Elfenbein, H. A. & N. Ambady 2003a. Cultural similarity's consequences: A distance perspective on cross-cultural differences in emotion recognition. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 34(1). 92-110, 2002b. On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin 128(2). 203-235), as both groups of listeners performed similarly on average in both recordings. Likewise, the Prosodic Proximity hypothesis was not supported by our data, since French listeners did not outperform American English listeners in recognizing emotions in Korean, although French and Korean obviously share basic prosodic structures. Instead, the effect of culture and language was emotion-specific, varying across Speaker Language and/or Listener Language. Additionally, despite the significant impact of the emotional dimensions of arousal, valence, and basicness on recognition accuracy, these dimensions did not consistently predict accuracy, since individual emotions deviated from the general patterns of accuracy due to emotion-specific features. Together, these findings provide a more nuanced perspective on the relative contributions of universality, culture, language, and emotional dimensions to cross-cultural emotion recognition, especially for listeners unfamiliar with the target language.