SSS03B Association between emotional perception and personality - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

SSS03B Association between emotional perception and personality traits

Lin Xuanchang Lin Yutong Asst Prof Xu Hong

• A multifaceted, subclinical personality construct that impairs one’s

ability in interpreting and describing one’s own and other’s feelings

• Close relationship with various clinical illnesses and impairments in

social functioning

What is Alexithymia?

‘No words for feelings’

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To investigate the relationship between Emotional speech & Alexithymia To observe the integration between: Emotional content & Emotional Voice

OUR AIMS

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Experimental design

Sentence design

• Ten sentences each with positive, negative or neutral

valence and of similar length were produced

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Experimental design

Voice stimulus

• 4 actors, two males and two females were recruited to

record each sentence with happy, sad and neutral voices

• 24 sentences (72 voice tracks) were used for the

experiment after validation

For illustration: A neutral sentence: I turned off the light in my room just now

Happy voice Neutral voice Neutral voice

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24 STUDENTS 1 Emotional CONTENT block 3 Emotional VOICE block 2

METHODOLOGY

Emotional content block 3 Emotional CONTENT block 2 TAS test 4 4 AQ test 4 AQ test TAS test 5

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Rating of emotions

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Extremely happy Neutral Extremely sad

• One minute break within a block and 2 minutes break between blocks
• Pilot test conducted with 3 volunteers before actual experiment

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Capitalist Slides Lorem Ipsum has two main statistical methodologies are used in data analysis

Founded Since 1940

RESULTS

From E-Prime database

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→ most participants are able to identify the intended emotion of voices and contents

Ratings increase as they hear sadder voice/content

General results

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Emotion in VOICE

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Emotion in VOICE

Interpretation of data

• Only ratings for neutral and

sad voices were affected by incongruent content → Deviant ratings were given for those recordings

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Effect of Alexithymia in the Voice Task

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Effect of Alexithymia in the Voice Task

• TAS was correlated with two ratings: SadVoiceHappyContent(r=-.491,

p<0.5), and SadVoiceNeutral Content(r=-.500, p<0.5)

• Subjects with higher TAS scores tend to give lower ratings (less sad) to the

sad voice when the content is incongruent (i.e. happy or neutral) → more likely to think that a sad voice is less sad when the content is not sad

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Emotion in CONTENT

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Emotion in CONTENT

Interpretation of data

• Overall effect of voice emotions on

content ratings result in biased responses

• Non-significant result due to the

variation of voices and individual comparisons of readings

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Effect of Alexithymia in the Content Task

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Effect of Alexithymia in the Content Task

• TAS was correlated with a myriad of ratings and effects:

HappyVoiceNeutralContent, HappyVoiceSadContent, NeutralVoiceSad Content, SadVoiceHappyContent and SadVoiceNeutralContent

• Higher ratings (Sadder) to happy content as well as lower ratings (less sad)

to sad content when the voice and content are incongruent

• Subjects are more affected by emotion in voice when they are asked to

judge the emotion of the content

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• 1. Correlate Alexithymia and the ability to interpret

emotional vocalization

• 2. Attribute a direct factor for impairment in

perceiving emotional vocalization (whether it is emotional voice and/or emotional content that is more significant) Aims

Summary and discussion of results

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• Most were able to correctly identify emotions
• But the ratings are affected with varied voice and/or content respectively

→difficulty to evaluate voice or content independent of each other

• Effect of content on voice judgement more obvious than voice on content
• Positive voice can be more easily identified and more likely be focused in daily

interactions; sad and neutral voices are not as distinctive and are more affected Content and Voice

Summary and discussion of results

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Alexithymia and emotions in speech

Summary and discussion of results

• High alexithymic traits potentially leads to greater susceptibility to distractions from other

sources of emotional information especially in the content task

• Most pronouneced when sad voice is used

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Summary and discussion of results

• Autistic Spectrum Quotient Test was used
• No correlation with any results
• Thus the difficulty in perceiving emotional vocalization is mainly contributed by

alexithymia Autism and emotions in speech

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Extensions

• Importance of finding effective treatment for

Alexithymia

• Music as possible remedy?
• Further studies required to attribute a more direct

reason

Thank you!