The study described here investigates the perceived emotional content of “affect bursts” for German. Affect bursts are defined as short emotional non-speech expressions. This study shows that affect bursts, presented without context, can convey a clearly identifiable emotional meaning. The influence of the segmental structure on emotion recognition, as opposed to prosody and voice quality, is investigated. Agreement between transcribers is used as an experimental criterion for distinguishing between reflexive raw affect bursts and conventionalised affect emblems. A detailed account of 28 affect burst classes is given, including perceived emotion and recognition rate in listening and reading perception tests as well as a phonetic transcription of segmental structure, voice quality and intonation….