A Qualitative Analysis of Affect Signs in Telecommunication Dialogues

Abstract

There is growing evidence in the science of psychology that affective phenomena are not homogeneous and that their manifestations may vary across cultures and under the influence of contextual and demographic factors. Given that there is no clear universal expression of emotions and mood in human behavioral processes, it is necessary to continue to study the heterogeneity of the observed features in language and speech. This qualitative study analyzes the dialogues of 40 individuals in the field of telecommunications and, using a content analysis and phenomenological approach, describes lexical and non-lexical signs that could indicate features of affect. It can be observed that complete saturation has not been obtained within the framework of these data, which may indicate a wide variation of verbal and non-verbal affect features at both intra-individual and inter-individual levels and indicate different possible dialects of affect features. In addition, inter-rater reliability was determined and its results suggest that the determination of affective features may be subjective, contextual, in the absence of predefined reference criteria even in valence and activation dimensions of core affect.