title: Effect of Acting Experience on Emotion Expression and Recognition in Voice: Non-Actors Provide Better Stimuli than Expected.
abstract: Both in the performative arts and in emotion research, professional actors are assumed to be capable of delivering emotions comparable to spontaneous emotional expressions. This study examines the effects of acting training on vocal emotion depiction and recognition. We predicted that professional actors express emotions in a more realistic fashion than non-professional actors. However, professional acting training may lead to a particular speech pattern; this might account for vocal expressions by actors that are less comparable to authentic samples than the ones by non-professional actors. We compared 80 emotional speech tokens from radio interviews with 80 re-enactments by professional and inexperienced actors, respectively. We analyzed recognition accuracies for emotion and authenticity ratings and compared the acoustic structure of the speech tokens. Both play-acted conditions yielded similar recognition accuracies and possessed more variable pitch contours than the spontaneous recordings. However, professional actors exhibited signs of different articulation patterns compared to non-trained speakers. Our results indicate that for emotion research, emotional expressions by professional actors are not better suited than those from non-actors.
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Ethology Laboratory, German Primate Center, Kellnerweg 4, 37077 Göttingen, Germany ; Courant Research Centre "Evolution of Social Behaviour", University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Rebecca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Jürgens
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Ethology Laboratory, German Primate Center, Kellnerweg 4, 37077 Göttingen, Germany ; Courant Research Centre "Text Structures", University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Annika
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Grass
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Ethology Laboratory, German Primate Center, Kellnerweg 4, 37077 Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Matthis
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Drolet
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Ethology Laboratory, German Primate Center, Kellnerweg 4, 37077 Göttingen, Germany ; Courant Research Centre "Evolution of Social Behaviour", University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Julia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Fischer
keywords: Acoustics; Actors; Emotion; Play-acting; Vocal expressions