Brief Emotional Vocal Expressions: Proxies for Decision Making in Emergency Calls?

Abstract This chapter focuses on whether perceived emotional intensity and help need is possible to discriminate in expressions of fear and neutrality in brief authentic emergency calls. Extraction of acoustic parameters of fear and neutrality was done prior to letting participants listen to a low-pass-filtered stimuli set. Participants discriminated fear and neutrality in both the intensity and help need condition. In turn, judged intensity and judged help need correlated strongly, with partial correlations indicating that participants use acoustically measured intensity (mean dB) as information to infer the intensity/help need relationship. We also discuss the implications of emotional expression in the call centre domain.