Abstract: A lot of researchers paid more attention to recognizing emotions that conveyed by visual information, for example, facial expressions. However, people can often understand others’ emotions and intentions by isolated speech cues, in the absence of visual cues. During speech communication, listeners form an impression about the speaker’s emotion state according to changes in pitch, loudness, rhythm, and voice quality (emotional prosody).Wang, Su, and He (2012) found that children were more incline to rely on prosody cues to identify the emotion of the speaker when the prosody and semantic cues were contradictory (e.g. a sad event was expressed by a happy prosody cue). Elfenbein and Ambady (2002) indicated that recognition accuracy was higher when emotions were both expressed and perceived by members of the same cultural group, which was called in-group advantage. Individuals from different cultural backgrounds recognize facial expressions involving universal principle. Evidence of cross-cultural agreement in recognizing emotions from a speaker’s vocal expressions has less been reported. . To explore whether vocal emotion expressions varied across cultures, 42 participants (21 Chinese university students, 21 Polish university students) were asked to judge five emotions (happiness, fear, anger, sadness and neutral) and give an emotional intensity evaluation among 3 options (slight, medium and strong) of a Chinese man and a Chinese woman from cues that conveyed by expressing neutrally semantic sentences in different prosody. A correct response to judging each type of emotion was scored with 1 and an incorrect response with 0. Giving a slight level of emotional evaluation was scored with 1, giving a medium level of emotional evaluation was scored with 2, and giving a strong level of emotional evaluation was scored with 3. The total score range of judging five emotions expressed by a man or a woman was from 0 to 5 separately. And the total score range of giving emotional intensity evaluation of four emotions expressed by a man or a woman was from 0 to 15 respectively. We conducted two repeated measures ANOVAs with scores of correct judging emotions and scores of emotional intensity evaluation as dependent variables separately, and with type of cultures (China and Poland), the sex of auditory materials (a man and a woman) and type of emotions (happiness, fear, anger, sadness and neutral) as within-subject independent variables. The results indicated that Chinese listeners performed significantly better than Polish listeners both in emotional category perception and in emotional intensity evaluation. All the participants scored higher in perceiving a woman’s vocal cues than in perceiving a man’s. Fear was the easiest emotion to be identified, while neutrality was the most difficult one. From the results, it was suggested that in-group advantage existed.

Key words: vocal emotion, culture, emotion category, emotion intensity, Polish, Chinese

摘要： 研究考察了42名大学生（中国21人，波兰21人）对男、女性用5种不同情绪声音（高兴、生气、害怕、难过和中性）表达的中性语义句子的情绪类型和强度判断，从而分析中国、波兰不同文化背景下，个体对基于声音线索的情绪知觉差异。结果表明：（1）中国被试对声音情绪类型判断的正确率以及情绪强度的评定上均高于波兰被试，说明在声音情绪知觉上存在组内优势；（2）所有被试对女性声音材料情绪类型识别的正确率以及情绪强度的评定均高于对男性声音材料；（3）在对情绪类型判断上，被试对害怕情绪识别的正确率高于对高兴、难过和中性情绪，对中性情绪识别的正确率最低；（4）在情绪强度评定上，被试对害怕情绪的评定强度高于对难过情绪，对高兴情绪的评定强度最低。

关键词: 声音情绪, 文化, 情绪类型, 情绪强度, 波兰, 中国