A validated battery of vocal emotional expressions

For a long time, the exploration of emotions focused on facial expression, and vocal expression of emotion has only recently received interest. However, no validated battery of emotional vocal expressions has been published and made available to the researchers’ community. This paper aims at validating and proposing such material. 20 actors (10 men) recorded sounds (words and interjections) expressing six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral and sadness). These stimuli were then submitted to a double validation phase: (1) preselection by experts; (2) quantitative and qualitative validation by 70 participants. 195 stimuli were selected for the final battery, each one depicting a precise emotion. The ratings provide a complete measure of intensity and specificity for each stimulus. This paper provides, to our knowledge, the first validated, freely available and highly standardized battery of emotional vocal expressions (words and intonations). This battery could constitute an interesting tool for the exploration of prosody processing among normal and pathological populations, in neuropsychology as well as psychiatry. Further works are nevertheless needed to complement the present material.