The voices of anger and disgust: Acoustic correlates in three languages

Anger and disgust are believed to represent discrete human emotions with unique vocal signatures in spoken language. However, few investigations describe the acoustic dimensions of these vocal expressions, and some researchers have questioned whether disgust is robustly encoded in the vocal channel. This study sought to isolate acoustic parameters that differentiate utterances identified as sounding angry versus disgusted by listeners based on evidence from three separate languages: English, German, and Arabic. Two male and two female speakers of each language produced a list of pseudo‐sentences (e.g., Suh fector egzullin tuh boshent) to convey a set of seven different emotions. The recordings were later judged by a group of native listeners to determine what emotional meaning was perceived from the prosodic features of each pseudo‐utterance. Individual sentences identified systematically as conveying either anger or disgust (greater than 3× chance target recognition) were then analyzed acoustically for various parameters of fundamental frequency, amplitude, and duration. Analyses compared which acoustic parameter(s) were dominant for identifying anger versus disgust in each language, and whether these patterns appeared to vary across languages, with implications for understanding the specificity and universality of these emotion expressions in the vocal channel.