Did you know that high intensity 💥 emotions do not always make vocal cues easier to recognize? In this post, DSEC Lab research assistant Jake Hartwig-MacDonald describes some surprising findings about the intensity at which various emotions 😄😡 are recognizable in the voice! 🗣️
#emotions #vocal #nonverbal #YGKyouth #science #affectivescience
Parents tend to speak to their young babies using “babytalk”, which researchers call “infant-directed speech”. 👶 This is thought to help promote bonding, attention, emotion processing, and language development in children. Former lab coordinator Emma Ilyaz put together an infographic describing the results of one of our studies on the impact of infant-directed speech (during a parent-child play session) on children’s later language abilities. Let us know what questions you have about this below! 🧑🍼
#research #parentchildinteraction #parenting #vocalcues #parentese #babytalk #languagedevelopment
One big focus of the DSEC Lab’s work is to better understand how we communicate emotions and attitudes through our tone of voice. 🗣️ Beyond the words we say, *how* we say something matters! 🗯️ But, how do we measure that “how”? PhD student Daniel Nault put together a primer of the 3️ main characteristics of the voice that can be combined to communicate emotional meaning. Swipe through the slides to learn more! 👉
#psychology #research #explainittome #acoustics #voice #speechanalysis #prosody #primer
Welcome to a new series: Psychology Terms Made Easy! 🙌 We’ll be breaking down the terms we use for concepts we study in the lab. First up: nonverbal encoding! 🎭 Flip through the slides to see an explanation of this concept, and an example of when you would be encountering nonverbal encoding in the real world!
Shout out to Honours student Sarah Robichaud for her work in creating this installment of #PTME! What terms do you want us to tackle next? 😁
Have you ever wondered whether children and adults express emotions in the same way? 🎭 Think of a toddler getting frustrated with a toy that won’t work, or of a teenager being angry about the rules their parents set. Is their expression of anger similar to that of an angry adult? 💭 This 2017 study looked at whether teenagers and adults used their voice differently when asked to communicate different emotions vocally (meaning, using their tone of voice). 🗣️ Speech analysis of their recordings showed that the two age groups, in fact, were NOT equivalent in the way they used pitch (how high or low your voice sounds) to express various emotions. 🤯 The results of this study suggest that teenagers don’t express their emotions in the same way adults do. This is important to keep in mind when interacting with adolescents! 💬 Have you noticed this in your daily life? Let us know in the comments below! (Thank you to Daniel Nault and Olivia Merulla for preparing these slides!) #research #ygk #developmentalpsychology #psychology #development #adolescence #science
Think back to the last time you felt angry: how did you express it? Like all emotions, anger can be expressed with high emotional intensity (screaming, yelling 🤬) or with low emotional intensity (seething, annoyance 😠). How easy is it for listeners to recognize that someone is feeling angry at these different levels of intensity? 📈 And, what about other emotions? This post covers the findings from one of our recent studies looking at how emotional intensity affects the way listeners interpret vocal expressions of emotion. We found that listeners’ ability to correctly say what emotion the speaker was feeling improved with increasing emotional intensity… but that this pattern was different for different emotions. 🧮 Interesting, no? Tell us what you think in the comments below! 👇 (Special thanks to former @DSECLab Honours student Julia Stratton for preparing this post!)
How do other people know when we're feeling angry or upset? 🎭 Beyond the words we use to communicate, our nonverbal cues (like our facial expression, or the tone of voice we use) can also help others to understand how we are feeling. What we say is only one piece of the puzzle... the way we say something also matters! #nonverbal #communication (Thanks to Daniel Nault & Jay Burns for creating these slides!)
If you’ve been following us for a while, you have probably heard us talk about “nonverbal cues”. Have you ever wondered what that meant? 🤔 We in the DSEC Lab are particularly interested in understanding how we use nonverbal cues to express our emotions to others, and to make sense of other people’s emotions. Former directed lab student Rafaela Platkin put this post together to explain what nonverbal cues are, and why they are important! ✨ What questions do YOU have about nonverbal cues? Let us know in the comments below! 👋
If you’ve been following us for some time (👋), you may already know that children and adolescents are less accurate than adults in vocal emotion recognition tasks, where they are asked to identify what another person is feeling based on their tone of voice. WHY might that be? 🤔 One potential explanation may be that youth and adults perceive vocal emotions differently 👂… which could influence how they interpret them in emotion recognition tasks. Flip through to read more about an earlier study that looked at this very question, and let us know what you think below! 👍 (Special thanks to Bingyi Lin, who put together this infographic about the study!) #research #developmentalpsychology #emotionrecognition #scicomm
As we develop, our ability to understand others’ emotional states based on their nonverbal cues continues to grow. 📈 But, it seems that the capacity to interpret facial expressions of emotion develops earlier than the same ability with vocal expressions! Because this skill is still developing throughout adolescence, it might be especially hard for youth to make sense of others’ tone of voice. 🔊
Check out our post to learn more about these findings! (A big shout out to Reem Atallah for creating this post!) Any questions? Leave a comment below! 👇
#research #ygk #developmentalpsychology #psychology #development #adolescence #science
