Affect in Multimodal Information

In face-to-face communication, the emotional state of the speaker is transmitted to the listener through a synthetic process that involves both the verbal and thenonverbal modalities of communication. From this point of view, the transmission of the information content is redundant, because the same information is transferred through several channels as well. How much information about the speaker's emotional state is transmitted by each channel and which channel plays the major role in transferring such information? The present study tries to answer these questions through a perceptual experiment that evaluates the subjective perception of emotional states through the single (either visual or auditory channel) and the combined channels (visual and auditory). Results seem to show that, taken separately, the semantic content of the message and the visual content of the message carry the same amount of information as the combined channels, suggesting that each channel performs a robust encoding of the emotional features that is very helpful in recovering the perception of the emotional state when one of the channels is degraded by noise.