Poster #44 - Children across cultures respond emotionally to the acoustic environment

• In Event: Poster Session 15

Abstract

Across cultures, acoustic environments are often personified as an emotional character, with descriptions such as a gentle rainfall, an angry storm, or a tranquil stream. Such metaphors are also reflected in the way psychological states are described with respect to environmental events such as a breezy personality and a stormy temper. Thus, human emotions appear to track changes in the acoustic environment. This is interpreted as the cross-domain hypothesis: responses to acoustic changes should be triggered regardless of the acoustic context in which they occur, whether in natural sounds, speech, or music.

The cross-domain hypothesis is supported by the finding on adult listeners that three acoustic attributes known to influence the emotional character of speech and music – pitch, intensity (i.e., amplitude), and rate – had clear and reliable emotional connotations when they were manipulated in environmental sounds that were neither musical nor linguistic, including sounds arising from human actions, animal calls, machinery, or natural phenomena, such as wind and rain (Ma & Thompson, 2015). To date, no research has examined whether environmental sounds have emotional connotations for young children and, if so, whether this phenomenon is observable cross-culturally. The aim of this investigation was to determine whether 3- to 6-year-old English-reared and Mandarin-reared children are sensitive to the emotional connotations of changes (intensity, rate, and frequency spectrum) in the acoustic environment.

Four types of environmental sounds were used, each containing four exemplars: Human actions (chewing, clapping, stepping, typing), animal sounds (bird, cat, cricket, rooster), machine noise (car engine, electrical drill, screeching tires, train), and sounds in nature (dripping water, thunder, waves, wind). Following Ma & Thompson (2015), acoustic manipulations were performed using Audacity 2.1.0. The three types of manipulation (intensity, rate, frequency spectrum) were examined separately in three conditions, using a between-subject design. This study used a face-sound matching task, where children were asked to point at the emotional face that matching a sound. The test consisted of four blocks – human action, animal sounds, machine noise, and sounds in nature – each containing 4 trials. On each trial, participants first saw two hand-drawn, lightly colored, schematic emotional facial expressions (a happy face and a sad face of the same character) presented side-by-side simultaneously in a split screen display. Then, participants heard two sounds (the increased [louder, or faster, or higher-pitched] and decreased [softer, or slower, or lower-pitched] versions of a sound) presented sequentially with a short pause in between, and were asked to point at the facial expression that matched the second sound by comparing it against the first sound.

The results indicate that human emotions track changes in the acoustic environment in 3- to 6-year-olds – a finding observed in both American and Chinese children. Specifically, increased intensity, rate, and frequency spectrum in non-speech, non-musical environmental sounds were associated with happiness, while decreased intensity, rate, and frequency spectrum were associated with sadness. Children’s understanding of the emotional connotation of sounds in the environment confirmed that they are attuned to the emotional meaning in the acoustic environment at age 3.

Authors

• Weiyi Ma, University of Arkansas
  Presenting Author

• William Forde Thompson