The most conspicuous way of human vocal communication is the usage of spoken language. However, the human voice conveys not only semantic information but also information about the emotional state of the speaker. The aim of our research in the long term is to understand human vocal emotional communication and its evolutionary roots. We use acoustic analyses and decoding-experiments to analyse how emotions influence the acoustic structure of the human voice, to identify which cues are used by listeners to recognize the emotional state of a speaker, and to determine the impact of learning and culture on the encoding and decoding of emotions.

Currently, we are focussing on a general methodological problem in research on vocal expressions of emotions: The majority of studies in this field are based on emotional expressions uttered by actors. It is unclear, however, whether the vocal expressions of play-acted emotions and of spontaneous occurring emotions are identical, or whether actors use culturally shaped stereotypes to portray emotions. Therefore, we compare spontaneous vocal expressions of emotions with play-acted ones. We investigate whether listeners are able to differentiate both types of emotional vocalizations, whether there are differences in the recognition-accuracy for play-acted and spontaneous emotions and whether cultural distance influences the ability of listeners to decode play-acted and spontaneous emotional expressions.