Importance of F0 for predicting vocal emotion categorization

Affective prosody is used to produce and express specific emotions to conversation partners. While pitch has been identified as a crucial cue for differentiating between emotions, there has been significant variation in the stimuli used by different groups of researchers to examine the acoustic cues necessary for the perception of vocal emotions. The Toronto Emotional Speech Set consists of 2800 items: 200 sentences (carrier phrase “say the word” followed by a target word) spoken by two adult female actors (one younger and one older) to portray seven emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness, pleasant surprise, neutral). In the current study, these stimuli were analyzed to determine which acoustical cues accounted for the most variance in categorizing stimuli into one of the seven pre-determined emotional conditions. The acoustical characteristics of mean duration, mean intensity, mean F0, mean range of intensity, and mean range of F0 were analyzed using a customized Praat script for each of the ...