Touch and voice have different advantages in perceiving positive and negative emotions

Rika Oya; Akihiro Tanaka

doi:10.1177/20416695231160420

Touch and voice have different advantages in perceiving positive and negative emotions

Iperception. 2023 Mar 21;14(2):20416695231160420. doi: 10.1177/20416695231160420. eCollection 2023 Mar-Apr.

Authors

Rika Oya¹, Akihiro Tanaka²

Affiliations

¹ Graduate School of Humanities and Sciences, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Tokyo, Japan; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo, Japan.
² Department of Psychology, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Tokyo, Japan.

Abstract

Previous research has revealed that several emotions can be perceived via touch. What advantages does touch have over other nonverbal communication channels? In our study, we compared the perception of emotions from touch with that from voice to examine the advantages of each channel at the emotional valence level. In our experiment, the encoder expressed 12 different emotions by touching the decoder's arm or uttering a syllable /e/, and the decoder judged the emotion. The results showed that the categorical average accuracy of negative emotions was higher for voice than for touch, whereas that of positive emotions was marginally higher for touch than for voice. These results suggest that different channels (touch and voice) have different advantages for the perception of positive and negative emotions.

Keywords: emotion; perception; touch; voice.