Happiness is the easiest vocal emotion to recognize and anger the hardest, with anger and fear showing the greatest age-related improvement¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · associational r2 · q3
Currency · newest study 2018 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person · overdue for a recheck since 2023: baselines and conditions change

Subclaims¶

q3 i? Across the whole age range, happiness was recognized with the highest accuracy, anger was least well recognized, and improvement within the age span was greatest for anger and fear. → Grosbras 2018

Evidence¶

Grosbras 2018¶

Grosbras, M.-H., Ross, P. D. & Belin, P. (2018). Categorical emotion recognition from voice improves during childhood and adolescence. Scientific Reports 8, 14791. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-32868-3

q3 · i? · associational · r2

Pairwise post-hoc comparisons of the four emotions in five age groups (children, pre-, early-, late-adolescents, adults) with Holm-Bonferroni correction, reported in Table 2 and Fig. 3. No standardized effect size is printed, so impact is null.

"Across the whole age range, happiness was the emotion recognized with the highest accuracy, followed by sadness and fear at around the same level while anger was the least well recognized"

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Confusion patterns between vocal emotions are broadly stable across development: children miscategorize anger as fear, adolescents as sadness — related
• Female children and adolescents recognize vocal emotions more accurately than males, with no interaction between sex and age — related
• Testing procedure (individual computer with headphones vs small-group loudspeaker with paper response) does not affect vocal emotion recognition performance or the developmental trajectory — related
• Adult-level vocal emotion recognition performance is reached between 14 and 15 years of age, with a non-linear trajectory of faster childhood improvement followed by a late-adolescent plateau — related
• The ability to identify basic emotions from non-linguistic vocal bursts improves significantly with age from 5 to 17 years — a broader claim this one bears on
• Children's average vocal emotion recognition performance is significantly below the adult group's average — related