The Influence of the Exaggeration of Vocal Emotional Expressions on the
Subjective Emotion Experience
Name: Sebastiaan Sarton
Student card no.: 10515275
Supervisor: Disa Sauter
2nd Assessor: Lisanne Pauw Department: Social Psychology
2 Abstract
Studies about emotion regulation have shown mixed results regarding how people experience
emotions subjectively when they exaggerate their emotional responses. Although there are clear
differences between the results of studies using physiological measures and studies using self-report
measures, contradictory findings of studies using self-report measures might also have originated
from limitations of their particular research designs. The present study tried to replicate the findings
of an earlier exaggeration study that used self-report measures, but clearly improved on the
limitations of said study. Additionally, the present study explored the question whether the
exaggeration of vocal emotional expressions is able to influence the subjective emotion experience.
Based on the results of earlier studies it was hypothesized that people would experience increased
arousal and increased emotional intensity when they exaggerate their vocal emotional response to
stimuli eliciting positive emotions, but not to stimuli eliciting negative emotions. Participants were
asked to exaggerate their vocal response to film clips eliciting amusement and disgust (exaggeration
condition), or just watched the film clips as they would naturally (control condition). Afterwards
they had to fill in two self-report questionnaires that measured arousal and emotional intensity. No
differences between the exaggeration and control conditions were found for amusement and disgust.
3 Introduction
Emotion regulation is an important aspect of interpersonal communication and social functioning.
In the case of interpersonal conflicts, emotional suppression is often an appropriate strategy to avoid
escalation and to work towards solving the conflict at hand. Another form of emotion regulation is
emotional exaggeration, which can be an appropriate strategy to use when you, for example, want to
show your sympathy towards your co-worker who has gotten a flat tire while driving to work.
Emotion regulation has been defined by Gross (1998b) as “the processes by which
individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience
and express these emotions.” (p. 275). A lot of research has been done in regard to the regulation of
emotions which encompasses several subfields of psychology (e.g., Gross, 1998b; Philippot &
Feldman, 2004). Some experiments have focused specifically on the subjective emotion experience
when people modulate their emotional response by the means of suppression, reappraisal or
exaggeration. The present study will explore the question whether people experience more arousal
and increased emotional intensity when they exaggerate their emotional response to stimuli eliciting
discrete emotions. The present study will also try to extend the findings of earlier studies by
assessing the role of vocal emotional expressions, instead of asking participants to modulate their
facial emotional response which is typically done in exaggeration research (e.g. Strack, Martin &
Stepper, 1988; Demaree, Schmeichel, Robinson, & Everhart, 2004).
Some interesting results have been found regarding how people experience their emotions
subjectively when they regulate their emotions by exaggerating their emotional responses. Higher
levels of arousal seem to be a feature of emotion regulation in general. Studies using physiological
measures have consistently found that people experience more arousal when exaggerating
(Demaree et al., 2004; Demaree, Schmeichel, Robinson, Pu, Everhart, & Berntson, 2006;
Schmeichel, Demaree, Robinson, & Pu, 2006) and suppressing (e.g. Gross & Levenson, 1993,
1997; Gross, 1998a; Richards & Gross, 1999) their responses to emotion eliciting stimuli.
4
exaggerating and suppressing emotional responses on experienced emotional intensity, by the
means of physiological measures (Jackson, Malmstadt, Larson, & Davidson, 2000). Participants
had to suppress, maintain or enhance (exaggerate) their emotional response to high arousal eliciting,
highly unpleasant picture slides. Higher startle eye blink magnitude and facial muscle (corrugator
supercilii) activity was found in the enhancement condition. According to the authors, this indicated
that the exaggeration of an emotional response led to an even more unpleasant experience while
viewing the picture slides, compared to the neutral condition. Additionally, participants showed
lower scores on the two measures in the suppression condition, compared to the neutral condition.
For this matter, suppression and exaggeration seem to be opposites of each other in terms of their
influence on emotional intensity: suppression caused lower levels of experienced negative affect,
while exaggeration caused higher levels of experienced negative affect, in comparison to the neutral
condition. These results are interesting, because they do give an indication about the effect of
emotion exaggeration on how emotions are being experienced subjectively. Additionally, their study
shows the difference between exaggerating emotional responses and suppressing emotional
responses in how they shape the subjective emotion experience.
However, it could be argued that physiological measures are not able to capture what a
person feels while experiencing an emotion. Although physiological measures indicate that they
would, do people really feel more aroused, and do people really feel increased emotional intensity
when exaggerating their emotional response? Emotional experiences contain a subjective
component that can probably be measured more effectively with self-reports (Wallbott & Scherer,
1989). Additionally, physiological measures are only able to assess general positive or negative
emotional intensity, when looking at the Jackson et al. (2000) study. Physiological measures are as
far as is known not capable to show if people also experience an increased intensity of a specific
discrete emotion. According to Gross and Levenson (1995) “a discrete emotional response has
occurred when a participant reports feeling a single emotion more intensely than 15 other positive
5
stimuli, they developed a self-report questionnaire which measures the intensity of 16 discrete
emotional states. In addition to that, they also developed stimuli (film clips cut from existing films,
both commercial and non-commercial) which were able to elicit discrete emotional states in at least
78 percent of their sample. Their self-report questionnaire and their stimuli have been used in
several studies about emotion regulation.
According to the results of physiological measures, one could expect that people would also
self-report feeling increased arousal and feeling discrete emotions more intensely, while
exaggerating their emotional response. However, the results of self-report measures have not been
as clear cut, and have sometimes been inconsistent with the findings of physiological measures.
Several studies have found that exaggerating facial expressions does not lead to more self-reported
emotional intensity and self-reported arousal in response to negative affective stimuli, such as
disgust-eliciting stimuli (Demaree et al., 2004; Demaree, Schmeichel, Robinson, Pu, Everhart, &
Berntson, 2006; Schmeichel, et al., 2006). Also, a decrease in self-reported emotional intensity has
not been found in response to stimuli eliciting disgust and sadness in suppression studies (Gross &
levenson, 1993, 1997). Schmeichel et al. (2006) concluded that the exaggeration as well as the
suppression of facial expressions might be ineffective at changing the subjective experience of
negative affective states, as well as the intensity of negative discrete emotions. Gross and Levenson
(1997) have provided a plausible reason for these findings that has yet to be tested. Because people
seem to control their negative emotions to a much larger degree than positive emotions (Wallbott &
Scherer, 1989), they might have had more experiences of disjunctions between their emotional
experience and their emotional expressions in the case of negative emotions. This might lead people
to infer their subjective emotion experience less from their negative emotional expressions,
compared to their positive emotional expressions which are being controlled to a much lesser
extent. However, this possible explanation seems to ignore the fact that results regarding negative
emotions have been found with physiological measures. At present it is unclear where the
6 emotion experience stem from.
In the case of positive discrete emotions such as amusement it has been found that
exaggerating or suppressing emotional expressions does lead to increases or decreases in
self-reported emotional intensity, respectively (Strack et al., 1988; Gross & Levenson, 1997). Another
study included both positive and negative discrete emotions (amusement and disgust) to explore
exaggeration as an emotion regulation strategy (Demaree et al., 2004). While watching film clips
eliciting amusement or disgust, participants were asked to either exaggerate their emotional
reaction, or to relax and watch the film clips naturally. According to their self-report measures, the
film clips did not elicit the intended discrete emotions, but did elicit general positive and negative
affective states. Their study did not find an increase in self-reported emotional intensity in the
exaggeration condition, contradicting earlier findings. Additionally they also did not find an
increase in self-reported arousal in the exaggeration condition, which contradicts earlier findings
because heightened arousal seems to be a prominent feature of emotion regulation. These results
were found in both positive and negative affective states. Their lack of results can possibly be
explained due to the fact that their study was seriously underpowered: the between participants
design did only use 13 participants per condition. Also, no other study than the Demaree et al.
(2004) study has looked at self-reported arousal when people exaggerate positive emotions.
Because limitations of their research design are probably the reason for the lack of results, it is still
possible that people do experience more arousal and higher emotional intensity when exaggerating
positive emotions.
An important point to address is that most research in the area of the subjective experience
of emotion regulation has been focused on facial expressions in response to emotion eliciting
stimuli. In some studies participants' facial expressions have been used as the sole measure of
subjective experience and concurrently as a manipulation check (Gross & Levenson, 1993; Gross &
Levenson, 1997; Gross, 1998a; Richards & Gross, 1999). In addition to that, participants in some
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Demaree, Robinson, Pu, & Allen, 2006; Demaree, Schmeichel, Robinson, Pu, Everhart, &
Berntson, 2006; Schmeichel et al., 2006), after which their facial expressions were also rated.
However, there has not been a lot of research about the subjective experience of emotion regulation
that takes other nonverbal communicative channels into account.
Facial expressions are an important, but of course not the only nonverbal communicative
channel from which emotional signals can be interpreted. Another important channel concerning
nonverbal emotion communication is the voice. The voice communicates verbal as well as
nonverbal information (Frank, Maroulis & Griffin, 2013). In addition to verbal information, the
voice also communicates acoustic properties, such as loudness and pitch. It has been found that both
vocal emotional expressions and facial emotional expressions are able to convey information about
the senders' emotion experience (Zuckerman, Larrance, Spiegel & Klorman, 1980). This should
enable an observer to assess experienced emotional intensity while only paying attention to the
vocal channel. Being able to convey information from the vocal emotional channel exclusively is a
requirement for the research paradigm employed by the present study. Strictly speaking, in similar
suppression and exaggeration studies facial emotional intensity displayed by the participants had to
be rated as a manipulation check.
Additionally it could be possible that the exaggeration of vocal expressions does also lead to
people experiencing their emotions more intensely. Gross and Levenson (1993) expected that the
facial feedback hypothesis (Buck, 1980) might be one of the driving forces behind the finding that
people experience their emotions as less intense when they suppress them. Support has also been
found for a similar vocal feedback hypothesis (Hatfield, Hsee, Costello, Schalekamp Weisman, &
Denney, 1995). In their study participants had to reproduce sound patterns, of which the voice
quality, the rhythm, the intonation and the pausing corresponded to feelings of joy, love, sadness,
anger and fear. They developed the sound patterns with a group of 20 communication experts. The
stimuli were validated, finding that the emotions corresponding to the sound patterns were being
8
experimental condition were abstract and therefore left the participants blind to the purpose of the
study. A control condition was included in which the participants had to reproduce a neutral drone
sound. The results indicated that the participants experienced more positive affect when reproducing
joy and love sound patterns and more negative affect when reproducing sadness, anger and fear
sound patterns compared to the control condition. These findings on vocal emotional expressions
suggest that the exaggeration of said expressions would be able to shape the subjective emotion
experience, at least when people are being exposed to positive emotional stimuli. However, based
on previous exaggeration and suppression research, it is unlikely that the same would be the case
when people are being exposed to negative emotional stimuli.
The present study explored the same hypothesis regarding self-reported emotional intensity
as the Demaree et al. (2004) study, but did improve on its limitations concerning the design and the
materials. The present study used a mixed design, with at least 25 participants per condition, in
which every participant has been exposed to two of the four conditions. The participants would
either receive instructions to watch the amusement and the disgust film clips as they naturally
would, or to exaggerate their emotional response to both film clips. Demaree et al. (2004) did
clearly not use film clips from the earlier mentioned Gross and Levenson (1995) set, which might
explain why they were not able to elicit discrete emotions. The present study used two film clips of
this validated set. The method of the present study differed also from the Demaree at al. (2004)
study because participants were asked to exaggerate their vocal emotional expressions instead of
their facial emotional expressions.
It was expected that people experience amusement more intensely and feel more aroused
when they exaggerate their vocal response to stimuli eliciting amusement, compared to people who
did not modulate their emotional response. In the case of disgust, it was expected that there would
be no difference between the exaggeration and control conditions in regard to self-reported
9 Method
Participants
A total of 52 participants (14 men, 38 women) participated in the study. The sample consisted of 8
undergraduate students to fulfil a requirement of an introductory psychology course, and 44
participants participated for a financial reward (5 Euro for 30 minutes). The participants were 18-57
years old (M = 24.6, SD = 9.4). It was important that all participants spoke Dutch, because this is
the language in which the experiment was conducted. Dutch was the native language for 44
participants. Eight participants indicated that Dutch was not their native language, but they were
proficient enough in Dutch to be able to participate. This study used a 2 (happiness vs. disgust) x 2
(no-exaggeration vs exaggeration) mixed design. Participants were randomly assigned to either two
exaggeration (experimental) conditions or to the two no-exaggeration (control) conditions.
Materials
The stimuli that have been used were two film clips, which have been validated by Gross
and Levenson (1995) as being able to elicit discrete emotions. To elicit amusement, a two and a half
minute clip of the comedy “When Harry met Sally” was used in which people have a funny
discussion about orgasms in a café. The film clip was able to elicit discrete amusement in 93.1
percent of their sample. The mean intensity rating of this film on a 9-point scale (0 – 8) was 5.54.
To elicit disgust, a 30 second clip of the commercial film “Pink Flamingos” was used, in which a
person eats dog faeces. The film clip was able to elicit discrete disgust in 84.9 percent of their
sample. The mean intensity rating of this film on the same 9-point scale was 6.45. The film clips
were cut according to instructions provided by Gross (n.d.) on the website of Stanford University.
Vocal emotional expressions. As a manipulation check, the recorded vocal emotional
responses of the participants were rated by three independent judges who were blind to conditions.
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random order. The judges were asked to indicate for each vocal response whether they thought that
the recording corresponds to either amusement or disgust, or both. Likert scales were used to rate
vocal emotional intensity (1 = no emotion to 7 = high intense emotion). This has been done to make
sure that participants in the exaggeration conditions did indeed show more vocal emotional
intensity.
The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) (Watson, Clark & Tellegen, 1988) has
been used as a control measure to make sure that there were no differences between the
exaggeration and control conditions regarding the baseline affective state, before the actual
manipulation started. The PANAS measures the intensity of 20 affective states, of which ten
affective states are positive and ten are negative. An example of a positive affective state is
“inspired”. And an example of a negative affective state is “tension”. Participants were asked to rate
to what extent they experienced the affective states at the present moment on a 5-point Likert scale
(1 = very slightly or not at all, 5 = extremely). The validity and reliability of the Dutch translation
of the PANAS are considered to be sufficient by the test commission (COTAN) of the Dutch
psychology institute NIP (Egberink, Janssen & Vermeulen, 2014).
The Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) was used to measure self-reported arousal. The SAM
has been developed by Bradley and Lang (1994) to measure three aspects of emotional experience
on a Likert-type scale, namely; emotional valence, arousal and dominance. The SAM depicts five
illustrations on each aspect of emotional experience; from happy to sad (1-5), from aroused to
relaxed (1-5) and from submissive to dominant (1-5). Dominance has not been measured, because it
is not a relevant factor in the present study. General emotional valence has not been measured,
because this study used another measure to assess the intensity of discrete emotions. Only the
arousal question of the SAM was used in the present research. The SAM is a picture based
questionnaire, but in the present study it was accompanied with the sentence; “Choose the picture
that best depicts how active you feel after watching the film clip”. This has been done to further
11
question, rather than being accompanied with the other two SAM questions. The SAM has often
been used to measure participants' reactions to affective stimuli (e.g. Demaree et al., 2004;
Demaree, Robinson, Pu, & Allen, 2006; Bradley, Cuthbert, & Lang, 1996).
The Discrete Emotions Questionnaire (DEQ) has been used to measure the intensity of 16
different emotions elicited by video clips (e.g. Gross & Levenson, 1995; Demaree et al., 2004;
Schmeichel et al., 2006). In the present research the DEQ has been used to measure differences
regarding the intensity of experienced discrete emotions, between the experimental and control
conditions. All 16 DEQ emotions, including amusement and disgust, have been measured. The
participants rated their emotional state on a 9-point Likert scale from 0 (you did not even feel the
slightest bit of the emotion) to 8 (the most you have ever felt in your life). As there is no Dutch
version of the DEQ, it has been translated into Dutch for this study. The Dutch translation has been
added in appendix IV.
Procedure
After being welcomed by the experimenter, the participants were placed in a room with a computer
which they used to fill in the questionnaires and to watch the film clips (stimuli). A camera has been
present in the room that was used to record the vocal responses of the participants to the stimuli.
The participants were told that the recordings would be used to check whether the participants have
been taking part in the experiment seriously. When the participants agreed and signed the informed
consent, the experimenter left the room.
The stimuli and the questionnaires were presented in Qualtrics. Firstly the participants were
asked to report demographic information about their age and gender and filled in the PANAS next.
After that the two film clips eliciting amusement and disgust followed in a random order. The
following instructions accompanied the film clips for participants in the control conditions: “We
will now be showing you a short film clip. It is important to us that you watch the film clip carefully, but if you find the film clip too distressing, click on the stop-button and call for the experimenter”.
12
Participants who have been assigned to the experimental conditions received the following
instructions: “We will now be showing you a short film clip. It is important to us that you watch the
film clip carefully, but if you find the film clip too distressing, click on the stop-button and call for the experimenter. If you have any feelings as you watch the film clip, please try your best to
exaggerate these feelings. In other words, exaggerate your vocal reaction to the film clip, so that if somebody watched the videotape of you watching the film clip, they would know exactly what you were feeling”. These instructions have been taken from the Gross and Levenson (1997) study and
have been edited to fit the present study about exaggeration, rather than the original suppression
study. For the actual experiment, these instructions have been translated to Dutch and can be found
in appendix IV. The vocal reactions to the film clips in each condition were recorded with a video
camera. After each film clip the participants filled in two short questionnaires (the Self-Assessment
Manikin and the Discrete Emotions Questionnaire). Subsequently, the participants did also fill in
the neuroticism scale of the NEO-PI-R and the Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale (BFNE-2),
to be able to compare the results of this study to the study of Skene (2015). The NEO-PI-R and
BFNE-2 questionnaires have however not been used in the present study.
After finishing the experiment the participants were thanked by the experimenter. Before the
participants left they received a debriefing from the experimenter, which asked for their permission
to use their vocal recordings for analysis. When the debriefing was signed the participants received
13 Results
Firstly, one participant has been excluded, because the audio recording of this person was deleted
from the camera by accident. Another participant has been excluded because the camera recordings
indicated this person did not participate seriously. Further data inspection revealed that this person
did also not fill in the questionnaires appropriately. This left 50 participants (13 men, 37 women), of
18-58 years old (M = 24.8, SD = 9.5). Twenty-five participants remained in the control condition
and 25 participants remained in the exaggeration condition. The main analyses have been preceded
by three manipulation checks.
The baseline affective state. The first manipulation check tested for significant differences in
the baseline affective state of the participants between the control and exaggeration conditions. The
ten positive subscales and the ten negative subscales of the PANAS were merged to form variables
of baseline positive and negative affect respectively. An independent t-test revealed no differences
regarding the baseline positive affective state between the control (M = 3.30, SD = .61) and
exaggeration (M = 3.06, SD = .74) conditions, t(48) = 1.25, p > .2, 95% CI [-.15, .63]. The data of
the baseline negative affective state was not normally distributed, as shown by the fact that the
Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was significant, D(50) = .23, p < .001. Therefore a Mann-Whitney test
was used as a nonparametric equivalent of the independent t-test. The Mann-Whitney test revealed
no differences regarding the baseline negative affective state between the control (M = 1.36) and
exaggeration (M = 1.23) conditions, U = 254.00, z = -1.14, p > .2. In addition to the reported means,
also the medians of the negative PANAS scale and all other research variables can be found in
appendix III, because they should be reported alongside nonparametric tests (Field, 2009).
Vocal emotional intensity ratings. The audio clips that were rated by the three independent
judges were used as a manipulation check to make sure that participants in the exaggeration
condition did indeed show more vocal emotional intensity compared to controls. The four ratings
(all audio clips of the participants' vocal amusement and disgust expressions were rated twice) were
14
was used. High correlations were found between the two ratings of amusement, rs = .72, p < .001
and the two ratings of disgust, rs = .89, p < .001. Therefore the ratings were merged to form one
vocal intensity variable for each emotion. The merged variables were not normally distributed in the
case of amusement, D(50) = .15, p = .005, or disgust D(50) = .26, p < .001. A Mann-Whitney test
revealed that participants in the exaggeration condition (M = 3.10) showed more vocal emotional
intensity compared to the control condition (M = 2.14), U = 199.00, z = -2.23, p = .026, R2 = .10 in
the case of amusement. Another Mann-Whitney test revealed that also in the case of disgust
participants showed more vocal emotional intensity in the exaggeration condition (M = 3.62)
compared to the control condition (M = 1.38), U = 85.00, z = -4.65, p < .001, R2 = .43. These results
showed that participants in the exaggeration condition did indeed exaggerate their emotions more
than participants in the control condition.
Discreteness of the elicited emotions. To check whether the amusement and disgust film
clips elicited discrete emotions, the means of the 16 DEQ emotions had to be compared (see
appendix II for the means of the 16 DEQ emotions in all four conditions). The data of the DEQ was
not normally distributed (as shown in appendix I) and therefore it was not possible to compare the
means of the 16 emotions with an ANOVA with post-hoc comparisons. Instead a Wilcoxon
signed-rank test was used to compare the means of the target variables to the means of the emotion with the
second highest mean in each condition. In the control-amusement condition participants
experienced amusement (M = 6.44) more intensely than the second highest emotion, interest (M =
4.68), T = 50.50, z = -2.68, p = .007, R2 = .14. In the control-disgust condition participants did not
significantly experience disgust (M = 7.20) more intensely than the second highest emotion,
confusion (M = 6.08), T = 74.00, z = -1.71, p = .087, R2 = .06. In the exaggeration-amusement
condition participants experienced amusement (M = 6.76) more intensely than the second highest
emotion, interest (M = 4.80), T = 33.50, z = -3.20, p = .001, R2 = .20. Also, in the
exaggeration-disgust condition participants experienced exaggeration-disgust (M = 7.72) more intensely than the second
15
that the film clips did successfully elicit discrete emotions in three of the four conditions instead of
general positive and negative affective states. Although the mean of disgust was not significantly
higher than the mean of confusion in the control condition, the difference could be classified as a
statistical trend. The main analysis of self-reported emotional intensity therefore still compared
disgust in the control condition with disgust in the exaggeration condition, instead of comparing
general negative affective states.
Self-Reported Arousal. The SAM arousal scores were compared between conditions for both
emotions, to check whether the participants reported feeling more aroused while exaggerating their
vocal emotional response. The SAM data was not normally distributed in the case of amusement,
D(50) = .26, p < .001, or in the case of disgust, D(50) = .20, p < .001. Mann-Whitney tests revealed
that the participants did not report more arousal in the exaggeration condition compared to the
control condition in case of amusement, U = 265.00, z = -1.00, p > .3, or in the case of disgust, U =
282.00, z = -.62, p >.5. The results did not confirm the hypothesis that people would report feeling
more aroused while exaggerating their vocal emotional response to amusement-eliciting stimuli.
The results did however confirm the hypothesis that people would not report feeling more aroused
when exaggerating their vocal emotional response to disgust-eliciting stimuli.
Table 1. Means of Self-reported Arousal in the Case of Amusement and Disgust in Both the Control and Exaggeration Conditions.
Amusement Means Disgust Means
Control condition 2.96 2.80
Exaggeration condition 3.12 2.96
Self-Reported Emotional Intensity. The DEQ scores of amusement and disgust were
compared between conditions to check whether both discrete emotions were experienced more
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amusement, D(50) = .19, p < .001, or in the case of disgust, D(50) = .20, p < .001. Mann-Whitney
tests revealed that the participants did not report experiencing emotions more intensely in the
exaggeration condition compared to the control condition in the case of amusement, U = 289.00, z =
-.46, p > .6, or in the case of disgust, U = 284.00, z = -.58, p > .5. The results did not support the
hypothesis that people would experience stimuli eliciting amusement more intensely in the
exaggeration condition, compared to the control condition. On the other hand, the results did
confirm, as expected, that there was no difference in self-reported emotional intensity of disgust
between the exaggeration and control conditions.
Table 2. Means of Self-reported Emotional Intensity in the Case of Amusement and Disgust in Both the Control and Exaggeration Conditions.
Amusement Means Disgust Means
Control condition 6.40 7.16
Exaggeration condition 6.76 7.72
Exploratory Analysis – Do Self-Reported Emotional Intensity and Observed Emotional Intensity Ratings Relate? Following the hypothesis it is expected that there should be a relation
between how intense people reported feeling and how intense they were rated sounding for
amusement, but not for disgust. Although no significant differences were found between the
exaggeration and control conditions for amusement and disgust, it was checked whether
self-reported emotional intensity and the vocal intensity ratings by the independent judges correlated
positively. Spearman's correlation coefficient was used because the variables were not normally
distributed, as shown before. The analysis revealed a statistical trend, but no significant correlation
between self-reported emotional intensity and how intense people were rated sounding for
17 Discussion
The purpose of this study was to replicate the findings of Demaree et al. (2004), and to test whether
the exaggeration of vocal expressions increases emotional intensity in a similar way as facial
expressions have been hypothesized to do. The present study did find support for earlier findings
that the exaggeration of emotional expressions in response to stimuli eliciting negative emotions
does not change the subjective experience. Participants who exaggerated their emotional response
to the disgust-eliciting film clip did not report feeling more aroused and did not experience
increased emotional intensity, compared to the control condition. However, the hypothesis was not
supported with regard to the subjective emotion experience when people exaggerated their
emotional response to stimuli eliciting positive emotions. Participants who exaggerated their vocal
emotional response to the amusement-eliciting film clip did not report feeling more aroused, and
did also not experience increased emotional intensity compared to the control condition.
The present study did successfully improve on the limitations of the Demaree et al. (2004)
study. This study did include at least 25 participants per condition, and one of the between-subjects
variables was made into a within-subjects factor, resulting in more statistical power to test the
hypothesis. Moreover, the film clips used to elicit amusement and disgust did successfully elicit
discrete emotions in three of the four conditions, rather than more general positive or negative
affective states. In the remaining condition, the difference between disgust and the second highest
intense emotion can still be classified as a statistical trend. Additionally, the exaggeration
manipulation has been successful, because participants in the exaggeration condition did show more
vocal intensity compared to participants in the control condition, as has been determined by the
three independent judges who were blind to conditions.
Overall, the present study has been a robust test of the hypothesis, but still found similar
results as Demaree et al. (2004) with regard to experienced emotional intensity and arousal. It could
be argued that this might be due to the fact that the present study asked participants to exaggerate
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Following this argument, one could doubt that vocal feedback is as effective in changing the
subjective emotion experience in the same degree as facial feedback has shown to do in past
experiments (e.g. Strack, et al. 1988). These doubts may be partly justified as there has not been a
lot of research about the vocal feedback hypothesis. Furthermore, one experiment compared the
effects of facial, bodily and vocal feedback on the subjective emotion experience and found the
effects of vocal feedback to be the least consistent (Flack, 2006). The participants in the study at
issue were asked to produce facial muscle configurations, bodily postures and read text with vocal
qualities that correspond to multiple types of emotions. The expectation was that people would also
report feeling the corresponding emotions more intensely than any other emotion after producing
the expression. For a large extent this was true for facial and bodily feedback, in the case of both
positive and negative emotions. In the case of vocal feedback there was only an effect for
happiness, while it had inconsistent effects for the other emotions. However, it has to be taken into
account that the manipulation of the study at issue relied mainly on speech prosody instead of the
nonverbal vocalizations used by the present research. Their results might therefore not be entirely
suitable to explain the results of the present study.
On the other hand, while most emotion regulation studies about subjective emotion
experience have assumed facial feedback to be a possible working mechanism (e.g. Gross &
Levenson, 1993; Demaree et al., 2004), none of them have tried to quantify the influence it has on
the subjective emotion experience. Moreover, the proposed effect of facial feedback on the
subjective emotion experience has been non-existent in the case of negative emotions (e.g.
Schmeichel, 2006). It is not clear whether there is a difference between the influence of facial and
vocal feedback on the subjective emotion experience. There have not been enough findings in this
area of research to indicate that the reliance on vocal emotion expressions has negatively impacted
the present study. Furthermore, a similar study that has been running simultaneously with the
present study did also not find any differences between the control and exaggeration conditions, in
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issue used the exact same method and materials, did also look at self-reported emotional intensity
and arousal, but used different participants from the same subject pool of the University of
Amsterdam. The fact that the results of both studies are comparable makes it less likely that the
usage of vocal emotional expressions was the culprit causing the lack of results in the present study.
To further assess the effectiveness of the manipulation, it is interesting to look at the results
of the exploratory analysis. Although the means of amusement and disgust were higher in the
exaggeration conditions compared to the control conditions, albeit non-significant, it is not entirely
clear whether this happened purely due to chance. The results of the exploratory analysis might
shed some light on this issue. The analysis revealed a weak positive correlation for amusement
between self-reported emotional intensity and how intense participants were rated sounding by the
independent judges. This relation was non-significant, but can be classified as a statistical trend.
Even if this relation were significant, an increase in actual vocal emotional intensity would only be
able to explain seven percent of the increase in self-reported emotional intensity. A possible
explanation therefore is that the manipulation might have worked to a small degree for amusement,
but has not been effective enough to cause significant differences between the control and
exaggeration conditions in the main analysis. However, the fact that the means of amusement and
disgust in the exaggeration condition turned out to be a bit higher for both emotions should
probably be attributed mainly to chance.
A possible limitation regarding the discreteness of the elicited emotions is that
embarrassment (one of the 16 DEQ emotions) has not been translated into Dutch correctly. In the
questionnaire that was used for the experiment, embarrassment has been translated as “verlegen”,
which practically means feeling shy. It should have been translated to Dutch as “in verlegenheid
gebracht”, which comes much closer to the definition of embarrassment. When translated right, this
might have impacted the results of the DEQ questionnaire, because both film clips contain elements
that might have also elicited embarrassment. It is however unlikely that it would undo the finding
20
The hypothesized effect of vocal expressions on the subjective emotion experience could not
be demonstrated, because of the lack of findings of the present study. There are a few issues about
vocal emotional expressions that should be discussed though. Two issues became clear when editing
the video recordings of the participants to separate the audio channel from the video. Although these
issues are not supported by quantitative data and therefore reflect the subjective opinion of the
author, they might prove useful to take into account, or to further explore in future studies about
vocal emotional expressions. Firstly, while looking at the videotapes of the participants it was clear
that vocal emotional expressions were always accompanied with a facial emotional expression.
Furthermore, the facial emotional expressions overall tended to be more intense when the vocal
emotional expressions also increased in intensity. Although the facial expressions have not been
rated, so there is no data to back up this claim, it could be questioned whether the current research
paradigm is suited to compare the influence of vocal emotional expressions to that of facial
emotional expressions. The hypothesis of this study expected that vocal emotional expressions
would lead to similar results, but there was also a possibility that their influence on the subjective
experience would be different from the influence of facial emotional expressions. While vocal and
facial emotional expressions were assumed to have similar qualities, they might also differ in some
aspects regarding they influence the subjective emotion experience. When vocal and facial
expressions constantly occur together it is difficult to isolate a distinct effect of one of these types of
expressions on the subjective emotion experience. This might be true to a greater extend for vocal
emotional expressions than for facial emotional expressions though. In some cases participants did
show facial expressions, but did not vocalize their emotions. On the contrary, participants did
always show facial expressions when they vocalized their emotions.
Secondly, one possible difference between vocal and facial expressions occurs when
emotional expressions reside on the lower end of the intensity scale. Facial emotional expressions
with low intensity seem to be much easier to interpret when compared to vocal emotional
21
becomes apparent what emotion they are experiencing when paying attention to their facial
expressions. Most of the times the participants showed clear amusement or disgust facial
expressions, but vocalized only a soft sigh or even made no sound at all. Although the present
research confirms that vocal expressions are also able to convey information about the senders’
emotional experience, as was also found by Zuckerman et al. (1980), emotional information
conveyed exclusively by the vocal channel could possibly be less frequent and less clear.
Schmeichel et al. (2006) concluded that the exaggeration and suppression of negative
emotions might not be effective at changing the subjective emotion experience. Demaree et al.
(2004), Skene (2015) and the present research show that the subjective emotion experience is also
not really being influenced when people exaggerate their response to stimuli eliciting positive
emotions. As far as is known now, it is not clear what causes underlie the lack of findings in the
studies at issue. Despite the absence of results there are still areas worth exploring. It could for
example be interesting to determine whether the suppression of vocal emotional responses to
stimuli eliciting positive emotions might reduce the experienced emotional intensity in a similar
research paradigm. Additionally, it would be interesting to check whether the modulation of vocal
emotional expressions lead to similar results regarding physiological measures as has been found in
the case of facial emotional expressions (e.g. Gross & Levenson, 1993, 1997; Demaree et al., 2004).
In both cases it might prove useful to take into account that vocal expressions possibly occur
together with facial expressions most of the time, and that it could be difficult to attribute the found
effects to vocal expressions exclusively.
Although an effect of the exaggeration of positive emotional expressions has not been found,
and not a lot can be said about the role of vocal emotional expressions in emotion regulation
research, there is still room to take the current research design into interesting directions. Hopefully
this study will be helpful for future research to uncover more insights about the subjective
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Appendix I – Tables of Normality Tests
Table 1. Normality Tests of the Vocal Intensity Ratings by the Independent Judges.
Condition D df p
Judge 1 – Amusement .22 50 < .0005
Judge 1 – Disgust .27 50 < .0005
Judge 2 and 3 – Amusement .21 50 < .0005
Judge 2 and 3 – Disgust .30 50 < .0005
Table 2. Normality Tests of the DEQ Questionnaire in All Four Conditions
Condition D df p
Control – Amusement .27 414 < .0005
Control – Disgust .31 414 < .0005
Exaggeration – Amusement .28 414 < .0005
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Appendix II – Means and Medians of the 16 DEQ Emotions
Table 1. Means (M) and Medians (Mdn) of the 16 DEQ Emotions in All Four Conditions.
Control conditions Exaggeration Conditions
Amusement M (Mdn) Disgust M (Mdn) Amusement M (Mdn) Disgust M (Mdn) Amusement 6.40 (7)a 2.16 (1) 6.76 (7)a 1.92 (1) Anger 1.60 (1) 2.16 (1) 1.52 (1) 1.64 (1) Arousal 3.52 (3.5) 1.68 (1) 3.00 (2) 1.36 (1) Confusion 2.60 (1) 6.08 (6) b 2.24 (1) 5.12 (6)b Contempt 1.68 (1) 4.64 (4.5) 1.64 (1) 4.12 (4) Contentment 4.40 (5) 1.60 (1) 4.52 (5) 1.20 (1) Disgust 1.80 (1) 7.16 (8)a 1.40 (1) 7.72 (8)a Embarrassment 3.56 (3) 2.48 (1) 3.40 (3) 1.84 (1) Fear 1.24 (1) 2.08 (1) 1.04 (1) 1.36 (1) Happiness 3.96 (4) 1.64 (1) 3.36 (3) 1.08 (1) Interest 4.68 (5)b 2.16 (1) 4.68 (5)b 2.16 (1) Pain 1.28 (1) 2.12 (1) 1.04 (1) 1.24 (1) Relief 2.12 (1) 1.40 (1) 2.20 (1) 1.36 (1) Sadness 1.28 (1) 2.12 (1) 1.00 (1) 1.28 (1) Surprise 4.32 (5) 5.32 (5) 3.64 (4) 4.68 (5) Tension 3.04 (2.5) 2.56 (2) 2.92 (2.5) 2.40 (2) a
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Appendix III – Means and Medians of the Research Variables
Table 1. Means (M) and Medians (Mdn) of the Research Variables in the Control and Exaggeration Conditions. Control Condition M (Mdn) Exaggeration Condition M (Mdn) PANAS Positive 3.30 (3.4) 3.06 (3.2) PANAS Negative 1.36 (1.2) 1.23 (1.1)
Judged Intensity Amusement 2.14 (2) 3.10 (2.5)
Judged Intensity Disgust 1.38 (1) 3.62 (3.5)
Amusement Arousal (SAM) 2.96 (3) 3.12 (3)
Disgust Arousal (SAM) 2.80 (3) 2.96 (3)
Amusement Intensity (DEQ) 6.40 (7) 6.76 (7)
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Appendix IV – Translations of the Materials and Instructions
Table 1. Translation of the Instructions.
Control Condition – English Control Condition – Dutch
“We will now be showing you a short film clip. It is important to us that you watch the film clip carefully, but if you find the film clip too distressing, click on the stop-button and call for the experimenter.”
“We laten u een korte film clip zien. Het is belangrijk dat u de film clip zorgvuldig bekijkt. Als u de film te verontrustend vindt, klik dan op stop en roep de proefleider.”
Addition to Exaggeration Condition – English Addition to Exaggeration Condition – Dutch
“If you have any feelings as you watch the film clip, please try your best to exaggerate these feelings. In other words, exaggerate your vocal reaction to the film clip, so that if somebody watched the videotape of you watching the film clip, they would know exactly what you were feeling.”
“Als u emoties voelt tijdens deze film clip, doe dan uw best om met uw stem deze emoties te overdrijven. Met andere woorden, zorg ervoor dat iemand die later naar een opname van uw stem zou luisteren precies weet hoe u zich voelde.”
Table 2. Translation of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) Instruction.
English Dutch
“Choose the picture that best depicts how active you feel after watching the film clip.”
“Kies het plaatje dat het beste aangeeft hoe actief u zichzelf voelt na het zien van de film clip.”
29
Table 3. Translation of the Discrete Emotions Questionnaire (DEQ).
English Dutch English Dutch
Amusement Plezier Fear Angst
Anger Boosheid Happiness Geluk
Arousal Opwinding Interest Interesse
Confusion Verwarring Pain Pijn
Contempt Minachting Relief Opluchting
Contentment Tevreden Sadness Verdriet
Disgust Walging Surprise Verrassing
Embarrassment* Verlegen* Tension Spanning
*The translation of “embarrassment” to “verlegen” was not entirely correct. The translation should have been: “In verlegenheid gebracht”.
