The role of speaker gender in vocal emotion recognition

This study investigates the impact of stimulus gender on vocal emotion recognition. To that end, 3 groups of listeners were asked to classify joy, neutral state, fear, anger and sadness in Italian meaningful and nonsensical sentences in 2 settings: a controlled laboratory setting to which a group of Dutch listeners was assigned and a naturalistic setting to which 2 groups respectively of Dutch and Italian listeners were assigned. Two levels of background noise were applied to the sentences to increase the level of task difficulty. Results showed an impact of stimulus gender on emotion classification performance, which seemed dependent on the emotion category: anger was better recognized when spoken by male speakers in both experimental settings, while joy was better recognized when spoken by female speakers by Dutch listeners in the laboratory and Italian listeners in the naturalistic setting, and fear was better recognized when spoken by female speakers in the naturalistic setting.