VOCAL EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS - A CROSS-CULTURAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL-APPROACH

The vocal expression of emotions, an unexplored field of research, is studied here in a double approach : crosscultural and developmental. The vocal emotion recognition test (Scherer and Wallbott, 1989) made up of 30 items depicting the emotions fear, anger, joy, sadness as well as utterances considered to be neutral, has been applied to 50 french adults comparatively to a group of german adults on which the test was first validated. This procedure was then adapted to a population of children. Three groups of children and teenagers aged 7, 11 and 15 years were tested. For the adults, the results do not show any major difference between the two cultural groups studied. A developmental evolution appears between 7 and 15 years in the recognition of the vocal stimuli. In the 15 years group, the results are quite similar to those obtained by adults.