
Petri LaukkaStockholm University | SU · Department of Psychology
Petri Laukka
PhD
About
99
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
August 2023 - present
January 2010 - present
Education
December 2004
Publications
Publications (99)
Central to emotion science is the degree to which categories, such as Awe, or broader affective features, such as Valence, underlie the recognition of emotional expression. To explore the processes by which people recognize emotion from prosody, US and Indian participants were asked to judge the emotion categories or affective features communicated...
Most research on cross-cultural emotion recognition has focused on facial expressions. To integrate the body of evidence on vocal expression, we present a meta-analysis of 37 cross-cultural studies of emotion recognition from speech prosody and nonlinguistic vocalizations, including expressers from 26 cultural groups and perceivers from 44 differen...
Emotional expression is crucial for social interaction. Yet researchers disagree about whether nonverbal expressions truly reflect felt emotions and whether they convey discrete emotions to perceivers in everyday life. In the present study, 384 clips of vocal expression recorded in a field setting were rated by the speakers themselves and by naïve...
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...
People frequently report feeling more than one emotion at the same time (i.e., blended emotions), but studies on nonverbal communication of such complex states remain scarce. Actors (N = 18) expressed blended emotions consisting of all pairwise combinations of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness – using facial gestures, body movement, and...
Researchers have proposed that variation in sex hormones across the menstrual cycle modulate the ability to recognize emotions in others. Existing research suggests that accuracy is higher during the follicular phase and ovulation compared to the luteal phase, but findings are inconsistent. Using a repeated measures design with a sample of healthy...
An important task in criminal justice is to evaluate the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. In this study, we examined if machine learning could be used to detect accuracy. Specifically, we examined if support vector machines (SVMs) could accurately classify testimony statements as correct or incorrect based purely on the nonverbal aspects of the vo...
The present study aimed to increase understanding of how singing activities may be initiated in primary school, and what support and assistance teachers require to conduct singing activities as an integrated part of the school day. Five music teachers participated in a focus group interview. The following main themes were identified: 1) pedagogical...
The ability to recognize and work with patients’ emotions is considered an important part of most psychotherapy approaches. Surprisingly, there is little systematic research on psychotherapists’ ability to recognize other people’s emotional expressions. In this study, we compared trainee psychotherapists’ nonverbal emotion recognition accuracy to a...
Introduction
Psychotherapists’ emotional and empathic competencies have a positive influence on psychotherapy outcome and alliance. However, it is doubtful whether psychotherapy education in itself leads to improvements in trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy (ERA), which is an essential part of these competencies.
Methods
In a r...
Background
Psychopathic traits have been associated with impaired emotion recognition in criminal, clinical and community samples. A recent study however, suggested that cognitive impairment reduced the relationship between psychopathy and emotion recognition. We therefore investigated if reasoning ability and psychomotor speed were impacting emoti...
Title: Learning to read emotions in psychotherapy: Trainee psychotherapists do not improve in emotion recognition accuracy due to psychotherapy education compared to a control group
Single paper/talk
Abstract:
Research suggests that psychotherapists' emotion recognition accuracy (ERA) is influencing therapy process and outcome. Even if psychoth...
In two studies, we examined if correct and incorrect testimony statements were produced with vocally distinct characteristics. Participants watched a staged crime film and were interviewed as eyewitnesses. Witness responses were recorded and then analysed along 16 vocal dimensions. Results from Study 1 showed six vocal characteristics of accuracy,...
To recognize and work with patients’ emotions is considered an important part of
most psychotherapy approaches (Greenberg & Safran, 1989). Surprisingly, there is
little systematic research on this topic. In this study, we compared trainee
psychotherapists’ non-verbal emotion recognition accuracy to a control group of
undergraduate students at two t...
We investigated emotion classification from brief video recordings from the GEMEP database wherein actors portrayed 18 emotions. Vocal features consisted of acoustic parameters related to frequency, intensity, spectral distribution, and durations. Facial features consisted of facial action units. We first performed a series of person-independent su...
Nonverbal emotion recognition accuracy (ERA) is a central feature of successful communication and interaction, and is of importance for many professions. We developed and evaluated two ERA training programs—one focusing on dynamic multimodal expressions (audio, video, audio-video) and one focusing on facial micro expressions. Sixty-seven subjects w...
The current study investigated what can be understood from another person’s tone of voice. Participants from five English-speaking nations (Australia, India, Kenya, Singapore, and the United States) listened to vocal expressions of nine positive and nine negative affective states recorded by actors from their own nation. In response, they wrote ope...
Age-related differences in emotion recognition have predominantly been investigated using static pictures of facial expressions, and positive emotions beyond happiness have rarely been included. The current study instead used dynamic facial and vocal stimuli, and included a wider than usual range of positive emotions. In Task 1, younger and older a...
The neuropeptide oxytocin plays a prominentrole in social and emotional cognition. Findings suggest thatexogenous intranasal oxytocin administrationfacilitatesemotion recognitionin humans,butindividual and contextual differences mayhave moderating effects.A major caveat in this line of work is that it is predominantly based on young males, which li...
In everyday life throughout the life span, people frequently evaluate faces to obtain information crucial for social interactions. We investigated age-related differences in judgments of a wide range of social attributes based on facial appearance. Seventy-one younger and 60 older participants rated 196 computer-generated faces that systematically...
The auditory gating paradigm was adopted to study how much acoustic information is needed to recognize emotions from speech prosody and music performances. In Study 1, brief utterances conveying ten emotions were segmented into temporally fine-grained gates and presented to listeners, whereas Study 2 instead used musically expressed emotions. Emoti...
Emotional vocalizations are central to human social life. Recent studies have documented that people recognize at least 13 emotions in brief vocalizations. This capacity emerges early in development, is preserved in some form across cultures, and informs how people respond emotionally to music. What is poorly understood is how emotion recognition f...
Intranasal oxytocin (OT) has previously been found to increase spirituality, an effect moderated by OT-related genotypes. This pre-registered study sought to conceptually replicate and extend those findings. Using a single dose of intranasal OT vs placebo (PL), we investigated experimental treatment effects, and moderation by OT-related genotypes o...
Findings suggest that intranasal administration of oxytocin improves emotion recognition. The brain mechanisms underlying these effects, however, are underexplored. A major caveat in this line of work is that it is almost exclusively based on young males, which limits current knowledge and potential for generalizability across gender and age. Adopt...
Findings suggest that intranasal administration of oxytocin improves emotion recognition. The brain mechanisms underlying these effects, however, are underexplored. A major caveat in this line of work is that it is almost exclusively based on young males, which limits current knowledge and potential for generalizability across gender and age. Adopt...
It has been the subject of much debate in the study of vocal expression of emotions whether posed expressions (e.g., actor portrayals) are different from spontaneous expressions. In the present investigation, we assembled a new database consisting of 1877 voice clips from 23 datasets, and used it to systematically compare spontaneous and posed expr...
It has been the matter of much debate whether perceivers are able to distinguish spontaneous vocal expressions of emotion from posed vocal expressions (e.g., emotion portrayals). In this experiment, we show that such discrimination can be manifested in the autonomic arousal of listeners during implicit processing of vocal emotions. Participants (N...
The ability to correctly understand the emotional expression of another person is essential for social relationships and appears to be a partly inherited trait. The neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin have been shown to influence this ability as well as face processing in humans. Here, recognition of the emotional content of faces and voices, se...
This study explored the perception of emotion appraisal dimensions on the basis of speech prosody in a cross-cultural setting. Professional actors from Australia and India vocally portrayed different emotions (anger, fear, happiness, pride, relief, sadness, serenity and shame) by enacting emotioneliciting situations. In a balanced design, participa...
Objectives
Insufficient sleep has been associated with impaired recognition of facial emotions. However, previous studies have found inconsistent results, potentially stemming from the type of static picture task used. We therefore examined whether insufficient sleep was associated with decreased emotion recognition ability in two separate studies...
Conclusion: Results showed that older adults (OA) are slower at reacting to happy targets compared to younger adults (YA) and that administration of oxytocin (OT) did not decrease reaction times. We also observed that women were more accurate inhibiting responses for happy distractors than men. Our findings suggest that age and gender can influence...
We investigated how memory for faces and voices (presented separately and in combination) varies as a function of sex and emotional expression (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral). At encoding, participants judged the expressed emotion of items in forced-choice tasks, followed by incidental Remember/Know recognition tasks. Result...
Stimulus identifiers for encoding and recognition tasks.
(DOCX)
This study extends previous work on emotion communication across cultures with a large-scale investigation of the physical expression cues in vocal tone. In doing so, it provides the first direct test of a key proposition of dialect theory, namely that greater accuracy of detecting emotions from one's own cultural group-known as in-group advantage-...
The present study examines the effect of language experience on vocal emotion perception in a second language. Native speakers of French with varying levels of self-reported English ability were asked to identify emotions from vocal expressions produced by American actors in a forced-choice task, and to rate their pleasantness, power, alertness and...
Instruction sheet given to participants (translated from French to English).
(DOCX)
Studies have shown that persons with schizophrenia have lower accuracy in emotion recognition compared to persons without schizophrenia. However, the impact of the complexity level of the stimuli or the modality of presentation has not been extensively addressed. Forty three persons with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and 43 healthy controls, matched...
The ability to recognize the identity of faces and voices is essential for social relationships. Although the heritability
of social memory is high, knowledge about the contributing genes is sparse. Since sex differences and rodent studies support
an influence of estrogens and androgens on social memory, polymorphisms in the estrogen and androgen r...
Unlabelled:
Deficits in auditory emotion recognition (AER) are a core feature of schizophrenia and a key component of social cognitive impairment. AER deficits are tied behaviorally to impaired ability to interpret tonal ("prosodic") features of speech that normally convey emotion, such as modulations in base pitch (F0M) and pitch variability (F0S...
Social memory, including the ability to recognize faces and voices, is essential for social relationships. It has a large heritable component, but the knowledge about the contributing genes is sparse. The genetic variation underlying inter-individual differences in social memory was investigated in an exploratory sample (n = 55), genotyped with a c...
Work on voice sciences over recent decades has led to a proliferation of acoustic parameters that are used quite selectively and are not always extracted in a similar fashion. With many independent teams working in different research areas, shared standards become an essential safeguard to ensure compliance with state-of-the-art methods allowing ap...
Background:
Both language and music are thought to have evolved from a musical protolanguage that communicated social information, including emotion. Individuals with perceptual music disorders (amusia) show deficits in auditory emotion recognition (AER). Although auditory perceptual deficits have been studied in schizophrenia, their relationship...
In social interactions, we must gauge the emotional state of others in order to behave appropriately. We rely heavily on auditory cues, specifically speech prosody, to do this. Music is also a complex auditory signal with the capacity to communicate emotion rapidly and effectively and often occurs in social situations or ceremonies as an emotional...
The possibility of cultural differences in the fundamental acoustic patterns used to express emotion through the voice is an unanswered question central to the larger debate about the universality versus cultural specificity of emotion. This study used emotionally inflected standard-content speech segments expressing 11 emotions produced by 100 pro...
Questionnaire and interview studies suggest that music is valued for its role in managing the listener’s impression of the environment, but systematic investigations on the topic are scarce. We present a field experiment wherein participants were asked to rate their impression of four different environments (a quiet residential area, traveling by t...
Which emotions are associated with universally recognized non-verbal signals?We address this issue by examining how reliably non-linguistic vocalizations (affect bursts) can convey emotions across cultures. Actors from India, Kenya, Singapore, and USA were instructed to produce vocalizations that would convey nine positive and nine negative emotion...
We present a cross-cultural study on the performance and perception of affective expression in music. Professional bowed-string musicians from different musical traditions (Swedish folk music, Hindustani classical music, Japanese traditional music, and Western classical music) were instructed to perform short pieces of music to convey 11 emotions a...
Vocal expressions are thought to convey information about speakers' emotional states but may also reflect the antecedent cognitive appraisal processes that produced the emotions. We investigated the perception of emotion-eliciting situations on the basis of vocal expressions. Professional actors vocally portrayed different emotions by enacting emot...
Schizophrenia is associated with deficits in the ability to perceive emotion based on tone of voice. The basis for this deficit remains unclear, however, and relevant assessment batteries remain limited. The authors evaluated performance in schizophrenia on a novel voice emotion recognition battery with well-characterized physical features, relativ...
One of the key criteria for whether Emotional Intelligence (EI) truly fits the definition of “intelligence” is that individual branches of EI should have at least moderate convergence with each other — however, for performance tests that measure actual ability, such convergence has been elusive. The authors approach this question using EI measures...
We present intra-, inter- and cross-cultural classifications of vocal expressions. Stimuli were selected from the VENEC corpus and consisted of portrayals of 11 emotions, each expressed with 3 levels of intensity. Classification (nu-SVM) was based on acoustic measures related to pitch, intensity, formants, voice source and duration. Results showed...
We examined what determines the typicality, or graded structure, of vocal emotion expressions. Separate groups of judges rated acted and spontaneous expressions of anger, fear, and joy with regard to their typicality and three main determinants of the graded structure of categories: category members' similarity to the central tendency of their cate...
Empirical studies have indicated that listeners value music primarily for its ability to arouse emotions. Yet little is known about which emotions listeners normally experience when listening to music, or about the causes of these emotions. The goal of this study was therefore to explore the prevalence of emotional reactions to music in everyday li...
Schizophrenia patients have vocal affect (prosody) deficits that are treatment resistant and associated with negative symptoms and poor outcome. The neural correlates of this dysfunction are unclear. Prior study has suggested that schizophrenia vocal affect perception deficits stem from an inability to use acoustic cues, notably pitch, in decoding...
Introduction:
Schizophrenia patients show decreased ability to identify emotion based upon tone of voice (voice emotion recognition), along with deficits in basic auditory processing. Interrelationship among these measures is poorly understood.
Methods:
Forty-one patients with schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder and 41 controls were asked to...
We investigated the neural correlates of expressed vocal affect in patients with social phobia. A group of 36 patients performed an anxiogenic public-speaking task while regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) was assessed using oxygen-15 positron emission tomography. The patients' speech was recorded and content masked using low-pass filtering (which...
Music is present in many sport and exercise situations, but empirical investigations on the motives for listening to music in sports remain scarce. In this study, Swedish elite athletes (N = 252) answered a questionnaire that focused on the emotional and motivational uses of music in sports and exercise. The questionnaire contained both quantitativ...
The majority of previous studies on vocal expression have been conducted on posed expressions. In contrast, we utilized a large corpus of authentic affective speech recorded from real-life voice controlled telephone services. Listeners rated a selection of 200 utterances from this corpus with regard to level of perceived irritation, resignation, ne...
Subtle temporal and spectral differences between categorical realizations of para-linguistic phenomena (e.g., affective vo-cal expressions) are hard to capture and describe. In this pa-per we present a signal representation based on Time Varying Constant-Q Cepstral Coefficients (TVCQCC) derived for this purpose. A method which utilizes the special...
Humans communicate emotion vocally by modulating acoustic cues such as pitch, intensity and voice quality. Research has documented how the relative presence or absence of such cues alters the likelihood of perceiving an emotion, but the neural underpinnings of acoustic cue-dependent emotion perception remain obscure. Using functional magnetic reson...
This study investigated the effects of anxiety on nonverbal aspects of speech using data collected in the framework of a large
study of social phobia treatment. The speech of social phobics (N=71) was recorded during an anxiogenic public speaking task both before and after treatment. The speech samples were analyzed
with respect to various acoustic...