Comparing Paid and Volunteer Participants in Emotional Responses to Vocal Emote Sounds

The hedonic and affective testing of sound effects lacks methodologies and empirical evidence around best practices for running experiments. We used a paired comparison between raw (untreated) human voice emotes and three "robotized" versions of a voice file. We recruited volunteers from social media, and compared the results with those of a paid participant service, Prolific. Our results showed that there were some statistically significant differences in the responses between the two groups of participants, indicating that researchers should use caution when combining data from different sources of participants.