Emotional prosody recording inventories
Our lab has made significant efforts over the years to develop acoustically and perceptually-defined speech materials that can be used in studies of emotional prosody.
Currently, we have several databases containing short utterances produced in four different languages: English, Arabic, Hindi, and Mandarin Chinese. Each database was constructed in a similar manner and is comprised of several hundred individual recordings produced to four native speakers of each language.
Each database contains:
- pseudo-utterances and utterances that are emotionally congruent with the prosody;
- produced by 2 female and 2 male speakers of the language;
- produced in 6 different emotions (happy, angry, fear, sad, disgust, surprise) and neutral affect;
- approximately 30 unique statements per emotion category (or 30 unique pseudo-utterances produced to convey all emotions).
RISC Video Database - Relational Inference in Social Cognition
RISC is an English-language database composed of short video vignettes depicting sincere, jocular, sarcastic, and white lie social exchanges between two people. Stimuli carefully manipulated the social relationship between communication partners (e.g., boss/employee, couple) and the availability of contextual cues (e.g. preceding conversations, physical objects) while controlling for major differences in the linguistic content of matched items. In total, the database entails 600 videos that have been validated concerning the identification of different speaker intentions as well as their perceived politeness, appropriateness and socio-emotional impact. Results of the validation studies are, among other information, provided in a detailed excel sheet.
We believe that RISC will prove highly constructive as a tool in future research on social cognition, inter-personal communication, and the interpretation of speaker intentions in both healthy adults and clinical populations. The open-access and peer-reviewed research article is available through the PLOS ONE website.
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If you would like to know more about the project and the primary researcher behind it, Dr. Kathrin Rothermich, listen to the Academic Minute and check out the media coverage by McGill University, IFL Science, and Daily Mail. If you are interested in obtaining videos from the RISC database for research purposes, please fill out the RISC Request Form.
