Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Swiss Center of Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Neuroscience of Emotions and Affective Dynamics Laboratory, Unimail, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Sci Rep. 2022 Oct 13;12(1):17144. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-21554-0.
Emotional prosody results from the dynamic variation of language's acoustic non-verbal aspects that allow people to convey and recognize emotions. The goal of this paper is to understand how this recognition develops from childhood to adolescence. We also aim to investigate how the ability to perceive multiple emotions in the voice matures over time. We tested 133 children and adolescents, aged between 6 and 17 years old, exposed to 4 kinds of linguistically meaningless emotional (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness) and neutral stimuli. Participants were asked to judge the type and intensity of perceived emotion on continuous scales, without a forced choice task. As predicted, a general linear mixed model analysis revealed a significant interaction effect between age and emotion. The ability to recognize emotions significantly increased with age for both emotional and neutral vocalizations. Girls recognized anger better than boys, who instead confused fear with neutral prosody more than girls. Across all ages, only marginally significant differences were found between anger, happiness, and neutral compared to sadness, which was more difficult to recognize. Finally, as age increased, participants were significantly more likely to attribute multiple emotions to emotional prosody, showing that the representation of emotional content becomes increasingly complex. The ability to identify basic emotions in prosody from linguistically meaningless stimuli develops from childhood to adolescence. Interestingly, this maturation was not only evidenced in the accuracy of emotion detection, but also in a complexification of emotion attribution in prosody.
情感韵律是语言非言语方面的动态变化，使人们能够传达和识别情感。本文旨在了解这种识别能力如何从儿童期发展到青春期。我们还旨在调查感知声音中多种情感的能力随时间如何成熟。我们测试了 133 名年龄在 6 至 17 岁之间的儿童和青少年，他们接触了 4 种语言上无意义的情绪（愤怒、恐惧、快乐和悲伤）和中性刺激。要求参与者在连续量表上判断感知到的情绪的类型和强度，而不是强制选择任务。正如预测的那样，一般线性混合模型分析显示年龄和情绪之间存在显著的交互效应。对于情感和中性发声，识别情绪的能力随着年龄的增长而显著提高。与男孩相比，女孩能够更好地识别愤怒，而男孩则比女孩更容易将恐惧与中性韵律混淆。在所有年龄段，与悲伤相比，愤怒、快乐和中性之间的差异仅略显著，悲伤更难识别。最后，随着年龄的增长，参与者更有可能将多种情绪归因于情感韵律，这表明情感内容的表示变得越来越复杂。从无意义的语言刺激中识别韵律中的基本情绪的能力从儿童期发展到青春期。有趣的是，这种成熟不仅体现在情绪检测的准确性上，还体现在韵律中情绪归因的复杂化上。
