Emotion-modulated recall: Congruency effects of nonverbal facial and vocal cues on semantic recall

The current study investigated whether automatic integration of crossmodal stimuli (i.e. facial emotions and emotional prosody) facilitated or impaired the intake and retention of unattended verbal content. The study borrowed from previous bimodal integration designs and included a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) task, where subjects were instructed to identify the emotion of a face (as either ‘angry’ or ‘happy’) while ignoring a concurrently presented sentence (spoken in an angry, happy, or neutral prosody), after which a surprise recall was administered to investigate effects on semantic content retention. While bimodal integration effects were replicated (i.e. faster and more accurate emotion identification under congruent conditions), congruency effects were not found for semantic recall. Overall, semantic recall was better for trials with emotional (vs. neutral) faces, and worse in trials with happy (vs. angry or neutral) prosody. Taken together, our findings suggest that when individuals focus their attention on evaluation of facial expressions, they implicitly integrate nonverbal emotional vocal cues (i.e. hedonic valence or emotional tone of accompanying sentences), and devote less attention to their semantic content. While the impairing effect of happy prosody on recall may indicate an emotional interference effect, more research is required to uncover potential prosody-specific effects. All supplemental online materials can be found on OSF (https://osf.io/am9p2/).

Do People Agree on How Positive Emotions Are Expressed? A Survey of Four Emotions and Five Modalities Across 11 Cultures

While much is known about how negative emotions are expressed in different modalities, our understanding of the nonverbal expressions of positive emotions remains limited. In the present research, we draw upon disparate lines of theoretical and empirical work on positive emotions, and systematically examine which channels are thought to be used for expressing four positive emotions: feeling moved, gratitude, interest, and triumph. Employing the intersubjective approach, an established method in cross-cultural psychology, we first explored how the four positive emotions were reported to be expressed in two North American community samples (Studies 1a and 1b: n = 1466). We next confirmed the cross-cultural generalizability of our findings by surveying respondents from ten countries that diverged on cultural values (Study 2: n = 1826). Feeling moved was thought to be signaled with facial expressions, gratitude with the use of words, interest with words, face and voice, and triumph with body posture, vocal cues, facial expressions, and words. These findings provide cross-culturally consistent findings of differential expressions across positive emotions. Notably, positive emotions were thought to be expressed via modalities that go beyond the face.

Imperfect mimicry of host begging calls by a brood parasitic cuckoo: a cue for nestling rejection by hosts?

Coevolutionary interactions between avian brood parasites and their hosts often lead to the evolution of discrimination and rejection of parasite eggs or chicks by hosts based on visual cues, and the evolution of visual mimicry of host eggs or chicks by brood parasites. Hosts may also base rejection of brood parasite nestlings on vocal cues, which would in turn select for mimicry of host begging calls in brood parasite chicks. In cuckoos that exploit multiple hosts with different begging calls, call structure may be plastic, allowing nestlings to modify their calls to match those of their various hosts, or fixed, in which case we would predict either imperfect mimicry or divergence of the species into host-specific lineages. In our study of the little bronze-cuckoo Chalcites minutillus and its primary host, the large-billed gerygone Gerygone magnirostris, we tested whether: (a) hosts use nestling vocalisations as a cue to discriminate cuckoo chicks; (b) cuckoo nestlings mimic the host begging calls throughout the nestling period; and (c) the cuckoo begging calls are plastic, thereby facilitating mimicry of the calls of different hosts. We found that the begging calls of little bronze-cuckoos are most similar to their gerygone hosts shortly after hatching (when rejection by hosts typically occurs) but become less similar as cuckoo chicks get older. Begging call structure may be used as a cue for rejection by hosts, and these results are consistent with gerygone defences selecting for age-specific vocal mimicry in cuckoo chicks. We found no evidence that little bronze-cuckoo begging calls were plastic.

Can Dogs’ Origins and Interactions with Humans Affect Their Accomplishments? A Study on the Responses of Shelter and Companion Dogs during Vocal Cue Training

The inclusion of life history as a possible influential factor is pivotal in studies on behavior, welfare, and cognition. Shelter dogs have usually experienced a life involving poor social interactions with humans. Thus, we aimed to investigate the behavioral responses of shelter dogs (SDs) and companion dogs (CDs) during the training of two vocal cues (“sit”, “paw”), as well as the possible associations between their responses and the behaviors of trainers. We studied 15 SDs and 15 CDs in up to eight five-minute training sessions. Dogs’ and trainers’ behaviors were recorded and analyzed (through GLM, GLMM, correlation and Mann–Whitney tests). Shelter dogs responded to more cues per session, with shorter latencies and fewer repetitions of cues. Moreover, SDs spent more time wagging their tails. Dogs’ sex and trainers’ behaviors were also associated with differences in dogs’ responses. The use of a reproachful tone of voice was associated with a greater number of cues responded to, shorter latencies, and fewer repetitions of cues. However, this type voice/discourse was also linked to a greater exhibition of non-training behaviors (e.g., exploring the room or jumping on the trainer), and to dogs spending less time next to the trainer and wagging their tails. On the other hand, the use of a neutral tone of voice and laughter, besides being linked to performance, was also associated with longer durations of tail wagging. Furthermore, the duration of the trainers’ orientation to dogs was correlated with the orientation of the dogs to the trainers. Our data suggest that, even when having experienced social deprivation from humans, SDs’ capacities to learn vocal cues were preserved, possibly due to ontogenic homeostasis processes. Shelter dogs’ greater interest in the sessions may be also credited to their socially-deprived routine. Our outcomes also point to an association between friendly interactions during training and dog performance and excitement, which suggests that such interactions may have the potential to improve SD welfare.

Speaking out of turn: How video conferencing reduces vocal synchrony and collective intelligence

Collective intelligence (CI) is the ability of a group to solve a wide range of problems. Synchrony in nonverbal cues is critically important to the development of CI; however, extant findings are mostly based on studies conducted face-to-face. Given how much collaboration takes place via the internet, does nonverbal synchrony still matter and can it be achieved when collaborators are physically separated? Here, we hypothesize and test the effect of nonverbal synchrony on CI that develops through visual and audio cues in physically-separated teammates. We show that, contrary to popular belief, the presence of visual cues surprisingly has no effect on CI; furthermore, teams without visual cues are more successful in synchronizing their vocal cues and speaking turns, and when they do so, they have higher CI. Our findings show that nonverbal synchrony is important in distributed collaboration and call into question the necessity of video support.

Vocal emotion adaptation aftereffects within and across speaker genders: Roles of timbre and fundamental frequency

Although previous research demonstrated perceptual aftereffects in emotional voice adaptation, the contribution of different vocal cues to these effects is unclear. In two experiments, we used parameter-specific morphing of adaptor voices to investigate the relative roles of fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre in vocal emotion adaptation, using angry and fearful utterances. Participants adapted to voices containing emotion-specific information in either F0 or timbre, with all other parameters kept constant at an intermediate 50% morph level. Full emotional adaptors and ambiguous adaptors were used as reference conditions. Adaptors were either of the same (Experiment 1) or opposite speaker gender (Experiment 2) of target voices. In Experiment 1, we found consistent aftereffects in all adaptation conditions. Crucially, aftereffects following timbre adaptors were much larger than following F0 adaptors and were only marginally smaller than those following full adaptors. In Experiment 2, adaptation aftereffects appeared massively and proportionally reduced, with differences between morph types being no longer significant. These results suggest that timbre plays a larger role than F0 in vocal emotion adaptation, and that vocal emotion adaptation is compromised by eliminating gender-congruency between adaptors and targets. Our findings also add to mounting evidence suggesting a major role of timbre in auditory adaptation.