Listeners cannot discriminate acted from natural human screams Pubblico

Abstract

Are people able to distinguish naturally occurring screams from acted ones? Some authors have suggested that aspects of expression are difficult or impossible to reproduce voluntarily without the concomitant internal state, and that acted expressions are therefore likely to amount to overly-intense caricatures; thus it remains an empirical question the extent to which acted expressions are in fact representative of those that occur naturally. Within this context, and evolutionarily, screams are of particular interest. We used a forced-choice discrimination paradigm to test whether acted and natural screams are perceptibly distinct. The results indicated that listeners could not make this discrimination overall, suggesting that acted and natural screams do not differ significantly in acoustic form. Generalized linear mixed models on listeners' intensity ratings of screams revealed that acted exemplars were not perceived as more intense than natural exemplars. However, scream duration predicted both the likelihood that an exemplar was identified as acted and the likelihood that participants discriminated that scream accurately. These findings are promising with respect to the external validity of studies using acted screams, but future work should determine whether longer screams, or other presentations conveying added information (e.g., multimodal displays) are more easily recognized as acted or natural.

Table of Contents

Introduction......................................................................................................................................1

Background......................................................................................................................................4

The Present Experiment.................................................................................................................13

Methods..........................................................................................................................................16

Results............................................................................................................................................23

Discussion......................................................................................................................................27

References......................................................................................................................................34

Appendix........................................................................................................................................42

About this Master's Thesis

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Psychology
Degree	MA
Submission	Master's Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Psychology, General
Parola chiave	emotional expression communication scream
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Gouzoules, Harold, Emory University
Committee Members	Bachevalier, Jocelyne, Emory University Nygaard, Lynne, Emory University

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