Validation of Emotion and Valence of Prosodic Stimuli

How we reason about emotions in others is thought to be a complex process involving the integration of various multisensory cues. Cues may include auditory information, such as prosody and content of vocalizations, and visual information such as facial or bodily movements. Studies of individuals’ abilities to match these various cues are often called cross-modal or inter-modal matching studies. One commonly used cross-modal matching paradigm examines individual’s ability to match facial emotions with vocal cues, or emotional prosody. Prosody is a term used to describe nonverbal features of speech including its loudness, pitch, and rate (Frick, 1985). While there is much debate as to how and when we develop discrete emotion categories, it is widely agreed upon that we can at least categorize emotional cues into broad dimensions of valence from an early age. In emotion research, valence is a dimension of affect characterized by degrees of pleasure versus displeasure or positivity versus negativity. To date, most cross-modal matching studies with children have investigated discrete emotions opposing in valence (e.g., happy and angry). Thus, it is not clear whether matching occurs according to children’s ability to differentiate between discrete emotion categories, or broader dimensions of valence. In a future study we aim to address this question by examining whether preschoolers match prosodic and facial cues when they are presented with response options within the same valence. However, to do so, we first need to validate a set of prosody stimuli to use. Prosody stimuli were obtained from Ma et al. (2022). Stimuli occupy four prosody types: happy, surprised, angry, and sad. Each prosody type is expressed for each of four neutral sentences, “I see a rug on the floor”, “this is a garbage can”, “one towel is folded”, and “my spoon is on the table”. The objective of the present study is to validate these stimuli to use in the Main Study. Our specific research questions are: 1. Will participants correctly categorize the intended emotion of each prosody type? 2. Will participants correctly rate the valence of each sentence?