Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 286, Issue 1906, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2019.0513
Keywords
emotion; arousal; cross-modal; spectral centroid; supramodal
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Funding
- McNulty Grant from the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center
- Neukom Institute for Computational Science Graduate Fellowship
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People express emotion using their voice, face and movement, as well as through abstract forms as in art, architecture and music. The structure of these expressions often seems intuitively linked to its meaning: romantic poetry is written in flowery curlicues, while the logos of death metal bands use spiky script. Here, we show that these associations are universally understood because they are signalled using a multi-sensory code for emotional arousal. Specifically, variation in the central tendency of the frequency spectrum of a stimulus-its spectral centroid-is used by signal senders to express emotional arousal, and by signal receivers to make emotional arousal judgements. We show that this code is used across sounds, shapes, speech and human body movements, providing a strong multi-sensory signal that can be used to efficiently estimate an agent's level of emotional arousal.
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