Social power and recognition of emotional prosody: High power is associated with lower recognition accuracy than low power

Uskul, A.K.; Paulmann, S.; Weick, M.

Abstract

Listeners have to pay close attention to a speaker’s tone of voice (prosody) during daily conversations. This is particularly important when trying to infer the emotional state of the speaker. While a growing body of research has explored how emotions are processed from speech in general, little is known about how psycho-social factors such as social power can shape the perception of vocal emotional attributes. Thus, the present studies explored how social power affects emotional prosody recognition. In a correlational (Study 1) and an experimental study (Study 2), we show that high power is associated with lower accuracy in emotional prosody recognition than low power. These results, for the first time, suggest that individuals experiencing high or low power perceive emotional language differently.

Citation

Uskul, A., Paulmann, S., & Weick, M. (2016). Social power and recognition of emotional prosody: High power is associated with lower recognition accuracy than low power. Emotion, 16(1), 11-15. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000110

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 8, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Feb 1, 2016
• Publication Date: Feb 1, 2016
• Deposit Date: Sep 12, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 18, 2018
• Journal: Emotion
• Print ISSN: 1528-3542
• Electronic ISSN: 1931-1516
• Publisher: American Psychological Association
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 11-15
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000110
• Keywords: Emotional prosody recognition; Social power
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1320420
• Related Public URLs: http://kar.kent.ac.uk/49512/