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Is there an advantage for recognizing multi-modal emotional stimuli?

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Abstract

Emotions can be recognized whether conveyed by facial expressions, linguistic cues (semantics), or prosody (voice tone). However, few studies have empirically documented the extent to which multi-modal emotion perception differs from uni-modal emotion perception. Here, we tested whether emotion recognition is more accurate for multi-modal stimuli by presenting stimuli with different combinations of facial, semantic, and prosodic cues. Participants judged the emotion conveyed by short utterances in six channel conditions. Results indicated that emotion recognition is significantly better in response to multi-modal versus uni-modal stimuli. When stimuli contained only one emotional channel, recognition tended to be higher in the visual modality (i.e., facial expressions, semantic information conveyed by text) than in the auditory modality (prosody), although this pattern was not uniform across emotion categories. The advantage for multi-modal recognition may reflect the automatic integration of congruent emotional information across channels which enhances the accessibility of emotion-related knowledge in memory.

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Notes

  1. For the uni-modal face condition, stimuli were initially extracted from both the lexical and pseudo-utterances, saved as silent .avi videoclips, which were presented to a group of raters. There was no statistically significant effect of identifying emotions from uni-modal face stimuli extracted from videoclips containing lexical versus pseudo-utterances; since including all of these items would yield twice as many items in this one condition, only uni-modal face stimuli from pseudo-utterances were used.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Meg Webb and Catherine Knowles for help with the stimuli and data acquisition. This work was supported by a Postdoctoral fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) awarded to the first author, and by a Discovery grant awarded to the second author by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex, CO4 3SQ, UK

    Silke Paulmann

  2. School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Marc D. Pell

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  1. Silke Paulmann
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  2. Marc D. Pell
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Correspondence to Silke Paulmann.

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Paulmann, S., Pell, M.D. Is there an advantage for recognizing multi-modal emotional stimuli?. Motiv Emot 35, 192–201 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-011-9206-0

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