The Effects of Emotionally Worded Synthesized Speech on the Ratings of Emotions and Voice Quality

The present research investigated how the verbal content of synthetic messages affects participants' emotional responses and the ratings of voice quality. 28 participants listened to emotionally worded sentences produced by a monotonous and a prosodic tone of voice while the activity of corrugator supercilii facial muscle was measured. Ratings of emotions and voice quality were also collected. The results showed that the ratings of emotions were significantly affected by the emotional contents of the sentences. The prosodic tone of voice evoked more emotion-relevant ratings of arousal than the monotonous voice. Corrugator responses did not seem to reflect emotional reactions. Interestingly, the quality of the same voice was rated higher when the content of the sentences was positive as compared to the neutral and negative sentences. Thus, the emotional content of the spoken messages can be used to regulate users' emotions and to evoke positive feelings about the voices.

[1]  A. J. Fridlund,et al.  Guidelines for human electromyographic research. , 1986, Psychophysiology.

[2]  B. J. Fogg,et al.  Silicon sycophants: the effects of computers that flatter , 1997, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[3]  Veikko Surakka,et al.  The effects of affective interventions in human-computer interaction , 2004, Interact. Comput..

[4]  Mahesh Viswanathan,et al.  Measuring speech quality for text-to-speech systems: development and assessment of a modified mean opinion score (MOS) scale , 2005, Comput. Speech Lang..

[5]  A. van Boxtel,et al.  Amplitude and bilateral coherency of facial and jaw-elevator EMG activity as an index of effort during a two-choice serial reaction task. , 1993, Psychophysiology.

[6]  Clifford Nass,et al.  Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship , 2005 .

[7]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  Handbook of psychophysiology (2nd ed.). , 2000 .

[8]  J. Morais,et al.  Norms of Emotional Valence, Arousal, Threat Value and Shock Value for 80 Spoken French Words: Comparison Between Neutral and Emotional Tones of Voice , 2009 .

[9]  Veikko Surakka,et al.  Subjective responses to synthesised speech with lexical emotional content: the effect of the naturalness of the synthetic voice , 2013, Behav. Inf. Technol..

[10]  Roger K. Moore.  Computer Speech and Language , 1986 .

[11]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  The skeletomotor system: Surface electromyography. , 2007 .

[12]  A P Shimamura,et al.  Source memory enhancement for emotional words. , 2001, Emotion.

[13]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  Handbook Of Psychophysiology , 2019 .

[14]  Jeff T. Larsen,et al.  Effects of positive and negative affect on electromyographic activity over zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii. , 2003, Psychophysiology.

[15]  P. Johnson-Laird,et al.  The language of emotions: An analysis of a semantic field , 1989 .

[16]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  Semantic, evaluative, and self-referent processing: memory, cognitive effort, and somatovisceral activity. , 1985, Psychophysiology.

[17]  M. Bradley,et al.  Measuring emotion: the Self-Assessment Manikin and the Semantic Differential. , 1994, Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry.