An application to enrich the study of auditory emotion recognition

Abstract

The ability to recognize emotions in spoken words is central in human communication and social relationships. When studying one's ability to perceive emotions, the standard paradigm is to have listeners choose which one of several emotion words best characterizes linguistically neutral utterances made by actors attempting to portray various emotional states. Usually, generic experiment control software are used, which may present several limitations. In this paper we present a novel approach to the problem, based on a mobile application that can be easily configured by the researcher to set up the desired protocol. This approach not only facilitates and improves study design and data collection, but also provides a plethora of new variables about the participants that, to the best of our knowledge, have never been considered before in this domain, including behavioural research.