Descriptive analysis of emotion and feeling in voice

Abstract

Recognition of human “emotions” or “feelings” from voice is important to research on human communications. Although there has been much research on emotions or feelings in voice, definitions of these terms have been inconsistent. We reviewed previous papers in linguistics, brain science, information science, etc. and developed specific definitions for these term. In our paper, “emotion” is defined as an involuntary reaction in the human brain; it has two states: pleasure and displeasure. “Feeling” (e.g., anger, enjoyment, sadness, fear, and distress) is defined as a state voluntarily resulting from an emotion. Here, we should notice that the pleasure-displeasure direction does not always correspond to the feeling. So, our objective is to obtain sufficient amount of voice data and to analyze the relationship between emotions and feelings. In voice recording experiments, the voice database from about 100 participants with various natural feelings was constructed. A result of descriptive analysis showed that pleasure-displeasure direction did not correspond to the each feeling in 5% of voice data. This result suggested that, if an experimental situation is constructed that tends to arouse various feelings, data with less variability can be obtained. Further analysis of the characteristics of the data obtained to identify situations in which the pleasure-displeasure direction does not necessarily correspond to the basic feeling should lead to improved accuracy of voice emotion recognition.