Klaus Scherer

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor emeritus at University of Geneva

Objective: To explore which cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) self-help app usage predicted depression during a selective prevention trial. Method: A recent controlled trial (ECoWeB-PREVENT) randomized young people aged 16–22, at increased risk for depression because of elevated worry/rumination, negative appraisals, and/or rejection sensitivity b...

Repetitive negative thinking (RNT), an important transdiagnostic process, is commonly assessed using trait questionnaires. While these instruments ask respondents to estimate their general tendency towards RNT, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) allows to assess how much individuals actually engage in RNT in their daily lives. In a sample of N =...

Increasingly frequent publications in the literature report voice quality differences between depressed patients and controls. Here, we examine the possibility of using voice analysis as an early warning signal for the development of emotion disturbances in young adults. As part of a major interdisciplinary European research project in four countri...

In an earlier study, we analyzed how audio signals obtained from three professional opera singers varied when they sang one octave wide eight-tone scales in ten different emotional colors. The results showed systematic variations in voice source and long-term-average spectrum (LTAS) parameters associated with major emotion “families”. For two of th...

Appraisal theory of emotion predicts that appraisal biases may generate stable emotion dispositions, which can ultimately lead to affective disorders. One example is the habitual underestimation of one's potential to cope with adverse events, which favors frequent experiences of sadness and worry and therefore increases the risk for development of...

Principal Component Metrics is a novel theoretically-based and data-driven methodology that enables the evaluation of the internal structure at item level of maximum emotional intelligence tests. This method disentangles interindividual differences in emotional ability from acquiescent and extreme responding. Principal Component Metrics are applied...

Free download from: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/3XPIP6W3KRW68EM4PKJV/full?target=10.1080/02699931.2021.2013163 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- While dimensional models play a key role in emotion psychology, no consensus has been reached about their number and nature. The current study sheds a ne...

Individuals vary in emotion recognition ability (ERA), but the causes and correlates of this variability are not well understood. Previous studies have largely focused on unimodal facial or vocal expressions and a small number of emotion categories, which may not reflect how emotions are expressed in everyday interactions. We investigated individua...

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism?

Aesthetic emotions are elicited by different sensory impressions generated by music, visual arts, literature, theater, film, or nature scenes. Recently, the AESTHEMOS scale has been developed to facilitate the empirical assessment of such emotions. In this article we report a semantic profile analysis of aesthetic emotion terms that had been used f...

Appraisal theories suggest that valence appraisal should be differentiated into micro-valences, such as intrinsic pleasantness and goal-/need-related appraisals. In contrast to a macro-valence approach, this dissociation explains, among other things, the emergence of mixed or blended emotions. Here, we extend earlier research that showed that these...

Background Promoting well-being and preventing poor mental health in young people is a major global priority. Building emotional competence (EC) skills via a mobile app may be an effective, scalable and acceptable way to do this. However, few large-scale controlled trials have examined the efficacy of mobile apps in promoting mental health in youn...

Verifying that conceptualisations of emotions are consistent across languages and cultures is a critical precondition for meaningful cross-cultural research on emotional experience. For achievement-related emotions tied to successes or failures, such evidence is virtually non-existent. To address this gap, we compared Canadian, German, Colombian, a...

Theory and research on emotion expression, both on production and recognition, has been dominated by a categorical emotion approach suggesting that discrete emotions are elicited and expressed via prototypical facial muscle configurations that can then be recognized by observers, presumably via template matching. This tradition is increasingly chal...

Background: Acoustic aspects of emotional expressivity in speech have been analyzed extensively during recent decades. Emotional coloring is an important if not the most important property of sung performance, and therefore strictly controlled. Hence, emotional expressivity in singing may promote a deeper insight into vocal signaling of emotions....

Studies such as the PISA 2012 and 2015 assessments document substantial differences in self-reported mean levels of achievement emotions across cultures. To date, it remains unclear whether such variation is at least partially due to cultural differences in semantic concepts of achievement emotions. To shed light on this issue, the present study co...

In this response to comments by Cupchik (2019) and Jacobsen (2019), we address the points made and extend the discussion to raise a number of issues to consider in the quest for ecologically valid research on aesthetic emotions generated by music performances.

Research on facial emotion expression has mostly focused on emotion recognition, assuming that a small number of discrete emotions is elicited and expressed via prototypical facial muscle configurations as captured in still photographs. These are expected to be recognized by observers, presumably via template matching. In contrast, appraisal theori...

The expression of emotion is an inherent aspect in singing, especially in operatic voice. Yet, adverse acoustic conditions , as, e. g., a performance in open-air, or a noisy analog recording, may affect its perception. State-of-the art methods for emotional speech evaluation have been applied to operatic voice, such as perception experiments, acous...

Appraisal theories of emotion, and particularly the Component Process Model, have claimed over the past three decades that the different components of the emotion process (action tendencies, physiological reactions, expressions, and feeling experiences) are essentially driven by the results of multi-level cognitive appraisals and that the feeling c...

Much emotion research has focused on the end result of the emotion process, categorical emotions, as reported by the protagonist or diagnosed by the researcher, with the aim of differentiating these discrete states. In contrast, this review concentrates on the emotion process itself by examining how (a) elicitation, or the appraisal of events, lead...

Modeling emotion processes remains a conceptual and methodological challenge in affective sciences. In responding to the other target articles in this special section on “Emotion and the Brain” and the comments on our article, we address the issue of potentially separate brain networks subserving the functions of the different emotion components. I...

This article suggests that methodological and conceptual advancements in affective sciences militate in favor of adopting an appraisal-driven componential approach to further investigate the emotional brain. Here we propose to operationalize this approach by distinguishing five functional networks of the emotional brain: (a) the elicitation network...

Studies that investigated the relation between appraisal and emotion have largely focused on the linear effect of appraisal criteria on subjective feelings (e.g., the effect of appraised goal obstruction on anger). Emotional responding can be extended to include more than just feelings, however. Componential definitions of emotion also add motivati...

This study tested whether EI (conceptualized as a performance-based ability) predicted economic and relational outcomes in an employee-recruiter negotiation above general mental ability (GMA) and whether a novel measure of emotion recognition ability (ERA; a central component of EI) predicted these outcomes better than an established broad ability...

Appraisal theories of emotion, and particularly the Component Process Model, claim that the different components of the emotion process (action tendencies, physiological reactions, expressions, and feeling experiences) are essentially driven by the results of cognitive appraisals and that the feeling component constitutes a central integration and...

Opera performances elicit strong emotional reactions in listeners. Yet, empirical demonstrations of these effects in situ are rare. Here we report a series of studies examining the emotional reactions of participants invited to the dress rehearsal of three different operas at the Geneva opera house before large audiences. Using a new affect checkli...

Although research on facial emotion recognition abounds, there has been little attention on the nature of the underlying mechanisms. In this article, using a "reverse engineering" approach, we suggest that emotion inference from facial expression mirrors the expression process. As a strong case can be made for an appraisal theory account of emotion...

In this article, we review the INTERSPEECH 2013 Computational Paralinguistics ChallengE (ComParE) – the first of its kind – in light of the recent developments in affective and behavioural computing. The impact of the first ComParE instalment is manifold: first, it featured various new recognition tasks including social signals such as laughter and...

In the present study, we applied Machine Learning (ML) methods to identify psychobiological markers of cognitive processes involved in the process of emotion elicitation as postulated by the Component Process Model (CPM). In particular, we focused on the automatic detection of five appraisal checks—novelty, intrinsic pleasantness, goal conducivenes...

MUSIC ENGAGEMENT IS COMPLEX AND IS INFLUENCED by music training, capacity, preferences, and motivations. A multi-modular self-report instrument (the Music Use and Background Questionnaire, or MUSEBAQ) was developed to measure a diverse set of music engagement constructs. Based on earlier work, a hybrid approach of exploratory and confirmatory analy...

Emotion understanding, which can broadly be defined as expertise in the meaning of emotion, is a core component of emotional intelligence and facilitates better intraand interpersonal outcomes. However, to date only very few standard tests to measure emotion understanding in healthy adults exist. Here, we present two new performance-based tests tha...

Although the human ability to recognize emotions in vocal speech utterances with reasonable accuracy has been well documented in numerous studies, little research has been reported on emotion recognition from emotional expression in the singing voice. This paper is the first to examine this issue by asking internationally known professional opera s...

There has been little research on the acoustic correlates of emotional expression in the singing voice. In this study, two pertinent questions are addressed: How does a singer's emotional interpretation of a musical piece affect acoustic parameters in the sung vocalizations? Are these patterns specific enough to allow statistical discrimination of...

Aesthetic evaluations are often couched in terms of emotional impact; for example, an artwork may be deemed fascinating, moving, or surprising. Such emotional responses have been called "aesthetic emotions." Given the broad variety of terms used to conceptualize emotional reactions to art and to other elicitors of aesthetic responses, the authors p...

Among emotions, surprise has been extensively studied in psychology. In linguistics, surprise, like other emotions, has mainly been studied through the syntactic patterns involving surprise lexemes. However, little has been done so far to correlate the reaction of surprise investigated in psychological approaches and the effects of surprise on lang...

Aesthetic perception and judgement are not merely cognitive processes, but also involve feelings. Therefore, the empirical study of these experiences requires conceptualization and measurement of aesthetic emotions. Despite the long-standing interest in such emotions, we still lack an assessment tool to capture the broad range of emotions that occu...

Factor structure matrix of an exploratory factor analysis with 24 factors. (DOCX)

Eigenvalues of the items’ polychoric correlation matrix for all 75 items and the factor analytic model. (DOCX)

Initial set of 75 emotion items included in the study and a priori categories. The original items included in the study in German and English along with our a priori categorization into 24 emotion categories. (DOCX)

Events and locations of the field study data collection. (DOCX)

Factor correlation matrix based on an EFA with 24 factors and oblimin rotation. (DOCX)

Factor structure matrix of an exploratory factor analysis with seven factors. (DOCX)

Factor correlation matrix based on an EFA with seven factors and oblimin rotation. (DOCX)

The Aesthetic Emotions Scale (Aesthemos). Presents an example of the Aesthemos for use in future studies. (DOCX)

The systematic study of music-induced emotions requires standardized measurement instruments to reliably assess the nature of affective reactions to music, which tend to go beyond garden-variety basic emotions. We describe the development and conceptual validation of a checklist for rapid assessment of music-induced affect, designed to extend and c...

Kommunikation bezeichnet allgemein den Prozess des Informationsaustauschs zwischen Menschen und stellt somit eine zentrale Grundlage des sozialen Lebens dar. In diesem Kapitel beschäftigen wir uns mit den theoretischen und methodischen Grundlagen der Forschung zur interpersonalen Kommunikation, d. h., der direkten „Face-to-face“-Interaktion zwische...

In this work, we compared emotions induced by the same performance of Schubert Lieder during a live concert and in a laboratory viewing/listening setting to determine the extent to which laboratory research on affective reactions to music approximates real listening conditions in dedicated performances. We measured emotions experienced by volunteer...

The link between different psychophysiological measures during emotion episodes is not well understood. To analyse the functional relationship between electroencephalography (EEG) and facial electromyography (EMG), we apply historical function-on-function regression models to EEG and EMG data that were simultaneously recorded from 24 participants w...

The link between different psychophysiological measures during emotion episodes is not well understood. To analyse the functional relationship between electroencephalography (EEG) and facial electromyography (EMG), we apply historical function-on-function regression models to EEG and EMG data that were simultaneously recorded from 24 participants w...

The ability to recognize other people’s emotions from their face, voice, and body (emotion recognition ability, ERA) is crucial to successful functioning in private and professional life. The Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT; Schlegel, Grandjean, & Scherer, 2014) is a new instrument to measure ERA in a more ecologically valid way than previous...

Most research on the ability to interpret expressions from the eyes has utilized static information. This research investigates whether the dynamic sequence of facial actions in the eye region influences the judgments of perceivers. Dynamic fear expressions involving the eye region and eyebrows were created which systematically differed in the sequ...

This report describes work carried out by the authors in preparation for the development of a Music Background Questionnaire intended to serve as a standard instrument to measure important background variables such as music activities, music abilities and attitudes, and frequent music listening experiences. In the course of development we decided t...

Emotions are short-term episodes involving feelings, cognitive appraisals, motivational action tendencies, motor expressions, and physiological changes. External or internal events elicit emotions. Emotions have been shaped by evolutionary adaptation and by sociocultural contexts. Theorists disagree about the relative importance of and the interrel...

A major emotion theory, the Component Process Model, predicts that emotion-antecedent appraisal proceeds sequentially (e.g., goal conduciveness > control > power appraisal). In a gambling task, feedback manipulated information about goal conduciveness (outcome: win, loss), control (perceived high and low control), and power appraisals (choice optio...

The ability to accurately interpret others' emotional expressions in the face, voice, and body is a crucial component of successful social functioning and has been shown to predict better outcomes in private and professional life. To date, emotion recognition ability (ERA) has mostly been measured with tests that heavily rely on static pictures of...

We propose to use a comprehensive path model of vocal emotion communication, encompassing encoding, transmission, and decoding processes, to empirically model data sets on emotion expression and recognition. The utility of the approach is demonstrated for two data sets from two different cultures and languages, based on corpora of vocal emotion ena...

The common conceptual understanding of emotion is that they are multi-componential, including subjective feelings, appraisals, psychophysiological activation, action tendencies, and motor expressions. Emotion perception, however, has traditionally been studied in terms of emotion labels, such as “happy,” which do not clearly indicate whether one, s...

Scherer’s Component Process Model provides a theoretical framework for research on the production mechanism of emotion and facial emotional expression. The model predicts that appraisal results drive facial expressions, which unfold sequentially and cumulatively over time. In two experiments, we examined facial muscle activity changes (via facial e...

The GRID study has provided a wealth of new data of high relevance to understand the semantics of emotion terms. This data can be profitably applied to create new tools for emotion research, or to further develop the existing ones. Here, we illustrate one such application by describing how the GRID paradigm was used to improve and further validate...

Emotions are an integral part of interactions with other people (e.g., colleagues) and objects (e.g. consumer goods). The assessment of emotional reactions is therefore important when striving to understand how to improve such interactions, e.g., when designing positive consumer experiences. central component of emotions, the “feeling component,” i...

Models of cognitive vulnerability claim that depressive symptoms arise as a result of an interaction between negative affect and cognitive reactions, in the form of dysfunctional attitudes and negative inferential style. We present a model that complements this approach by focusing on the appraisal processes that elicit and differentiate everyday e...

Diagnosing emotion disturbances should be informed by current knowledge about normal emotion processes. I identify four major functions of emotion as well as sources for potential dysfunctions and suggest that emotions should only be diagnosed as pathological when they are clearly dysfunctional, which requires considering eliciting events, realisti...

We investigated the role of facial behavior in emotional communication, using both categorical and dimensional approaches. We used a corpus of enacted emotional expressions (GEMEP) in which professional actors are instructed, with the help of scenarios, to communicate a variety of emotional experiences. The results of Study 1 replicated earlier fin...

tWe examine the similarities and differences in the expression of emotion in the singing and the speaking voice. Three internationallyrenowned opera singers produced “vocalises” (using a schwa vowel) and short nonsense phrases in different interpretations for 10emotions. Acoustic analyses of emotional expression in the singing samples show signific...

Contribution to the Brunswik Society Newsletter, October 2015

Humans have a strong tendency to affiliate with other people, especially in emotional situations. Here, we suggest that a critical mechanism underlying this tendency is that socially sharing emotional experiences is in itself perceived as hedonically positive and thereby contributes to the regulation of individual emotions. We investigated the effe...

Our experience of stress depends on how we evaluate the circumstances impacting our individual well-being. In principle, any event can be a stressor. Certain events can produce complex emotional states, such as a mixture of anger and worry. If such states are prolonged, they can lead to stress. Stress can be identified by means of such expressive c...

In this chapter the authors discuss the emotional power of the singing voice. The chapter begins by providing an overview of the process of externalization of emotions by the human voice. Then, the authors discuss some fundamental determinants of emotional expression in singing, namely the ‘emotional script’, the artistic interpretation, and the si...

Aiming at a more comprehensive assessment of nonverbal vocal emotion communication, this article presents the development and validation of a new rating instrument for the assessment of perceived voice and speech features. In two studies, using two different sets of emotion portrayals by German and French actors, ratings of perceived voice and spee...