Individual differences of emotional expression in speaker's behavioral and autonomic responses

The goal of this study is to elucidate differences in speakers’ emotional expressions in behavioral and autonomic responses. Verbal and non-verbal emotional behaviors of interlocutors were recorded during two types of dialogs (competitive and cooperative). Autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity (heart rate and skin conductance level) was also recorded as an internal measure of emotional reactions toward an interlocutor. To annotate the emotional states of speakers, the speakers who participated in the recording evaluated their own emotional states (arousal, valence and positivity) and their interlocutor’s states along with the time course of the dialogs. The behavioral and autonomic emotional reactions were used as independent variables for speaker-independent and speaker-specific models to predict a speaker’s emotion. The results demonstrate that speaker-independent models could explain each emotional state in a certain degree; in contrast, some speaker-specific models could explain each emotional state with moderate or high accuracy. Moreover, a comparison of the absolute standard partial regression coefficients of each variable of the models revealed that there are two types of emotional expression styles, one in which emotional behavioral expression is dominant and another in which emotional autonomic reaction is dominant.