Relativity in the perception of emotion in facial expressions.

We identified certain assumptions implicit in two divergent approaches to studying vocal affect signaling. The covariance'' model assumes that nonverbal cues function independently of verbal content, and that relevant acoustic parameters covary with the strength of the affect conveyed. Theconfiguration’’ model assumes that both verbal and nonverbal cues exhibit categorical linguistic structure, and that different affective messages are conveyed by different configurations of category variables. We tested these assumptions in a series of two judgment experiments in which subjects rated recorded utterances, written transcripts, and three different acoustically masked versions of the utterances. Comparison of the different conditions showed that voice quality and F0 level can convey affective information independently of the verbal context. However, judgments of the unaltered recordings also showed that intonational categories (contour types) conveyed affective information only i…