The Expression of Vocal Emotions in Cognitively Healthy Adult Speakers: Impact of Emotion Category, Gender, and Age

Abstract

This study examines the ability to express distinct emotions of negative and positive valences through voice modulations (i.e., affective prosody production) and how the speaker’s gender and age influence this ability. A sample of 31 neurologically healthy adults (17 women and 14 men, aged 41–76) were asked to say “papa” with six emotional tones—sadness, anger, fear, pleasant surprise, joy, and awe—in response to affect-evoking scenarios. The speakers’ vocal expressions were recorded and then assessed by five expert raters and 30 naive listeners using an emotion recognition task. Results showed that negative emotions were expressed more accurately than positive ones, highlighting a valence effect. In addition, female speakers showed higher recognition rates for their expressions of vocal emotions than male speakers. Furthermore, aging was associated with a moderate decline in the accuracy of prosodic emotional expression. Despite generally lower recognition rates from naive listeners compared to expert raters, recognition rates for all emotions, with the exception of awe, were not statistically different between listener groups. In conclusion, cognitively healthy adults can convey discrete emotions through prosody, including distinct positive emotions, but there are significant differences depending on the emotion expressed and individual speaker characteristics. These results highlight the complexity of affective prosody production and contribute to the understanding of individual differences in nonverbal emotional expression.