GAUDIE: Development, validation, and exploration of a naturalistic German AUDItory Emotional database

Behav Res Methods. 2024 Mar;56(3):2049-2063. doi: 10.3758/s13428-023-02135-z. Epub 2023 May 23.

Abstract

Since thoroughly validated naturalistic affective German speech stimulus databases are rare, we present here a novel validated database of speech sequences assembled with the purpose of emotion induction. The database comprises 37 audio speech sequences with a total duration of 92 minutes for the induction of positive, neutral, and negative emotion: comedian shows intending to elicit humorous and amusing feelings, weather forecasts, and arguments between couples and relatives from movies or television series. Multiple continuous and discrete ratings are used to validate the database to capture the time course and variabilities of valence and arousal. We analyse and quantify how well the audio sequences fulfil quality criteria of differentiation, salience/strength, and generalizability across participants. Hence, we provide a validated speech database of naturalistic scenarios suitable to investigate emotion processing and its time course with German-speaking participants. Information on using the stimulus database for research purposes can be found at the OSF project repository GAUDIE: https://osf.io/xyr6j/ .

Keywords: Affective reactions; Arousal; Clustering; Emotion; Emotional speech; German auditory stimulus database; Naturalistic stimuli; Valence; Validation methods.

MeSH terms

  • Arousal
  • Emotions*
  • Humans
  • Language*
  • Motion Pictures
  • Speech