Real vs. Acted Emotional Speech: Comparing South-Asian and Caucasian Speakers and Observers

Both acted and real emotional audiovisual speech was collected from 50 Caucasian speakers (from The Netherlands) and 45 South-Asian speakers (from Pakistan), using a novel adaptation of the Velten technique, in which some participants are asked to act as if they are in some emotional state, while these emotions are really induced in other participants. Generally, the acted conditions did not lead to systematic non-neutral emotions, while the non-acted conditions lead to the intended emotions being induced in both the Dutch and the Pakistani speakers (where the latter seemed to feel the emotions more strongly). Next we performed a series of perception experiments, in which Dutch and Pakistani observers were asked to judge the emotional state of Dutch and Pakistani speakers. It was found that acted emotions of speakers from both cultures were perceived as stronger than their non-acted counterparts by both Dutch and Pakistani observers. Interestingly, for Dutch speakers the negative emotions were perceived as relatively strong, whereas for the Pakistani speakers the positive emotions stood out perceptually.