The voice of emotions. Steps to semiosis of the vocal non-verbal communication of emotion

The object of this research is the vocal expression of emotions as flexible and culturally defined tools aiming at communicating. The emotional expressions can influence consistently the other behavior by participating the management of interactions and the negotiation of interpersonal relationships, as it emerge from the Behavioral Ecology approach, elaborated by Fridlund (1994), and the Minimal Universality approach, proposed by Russell (1995). The existing literature about suprasegmental vocal traits and their functions within communicative exchange points out the role of voice in expressing emotions. Results found in the last few years show with consistency the value and the effectiveness of paralinguistic components in the emotional expressions, with an accuracy of recognition which is around 60% (Scherer 1999; Sobin & Alpert 1999).Within the scientific domain recalled here, the vocal non-verbal expressions, even if they are one of the most effective and common tools of emotional communication, were studied in a limited number of experiments. Even lower it is the number of the researches exploring simultaneously the production of emotional expressions (encoding) and their recognition (decoding) (Anolli & Ciceri 1997). In particular, in accordance with the auditory scene approach, it is interesting to explore how patterns of acoustic variables can contribute as once in determining both auditory cognition and recognition of emotions, by which we think about sounds of emotions and not only we hear them (Bregman 1991; McAdams & Bigand 1994).