Understanding how we express and infer positive emotions
Research on non-verbal emotional expressions has largely been limited to the study of a small set of typically negative emotions and has heavily relied on the use of posed expressions. The EU-funded PEP project set out to change that. “To give the study of emotions a positive spin, we focused on studying how positive emotions feel and also how we express them through our face and voice,” says Disa Sauter, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam.
Calm and hope: two emotions at the heart of well-being
While the COVID-19 pandemic made some aspects of the project’s research more difficult, it did create a unique opportunity to study emotions and well-being during a period of sustained stress. This line of research, the results of which were published in the American Psychological Association’s ‘Emotion’ journal, used survey data collected from 24 221 participants in 51 countries during the pandemic, as well as a diary study. The PEP team, which included several postdocs and PhD students, discovered that different types of positive emotional experiences differentially relate to well-being. For example, researchers found that calm and hope are two emotions that are particularly important for well-being. “This is surprising given that affective interventions for improved well-being primarily focus on gratitude and compassion,” explains Sauter. She adds that being able to demonstrate this across a large number of countries around the world using multiple methods establishes this as a novel yet highly robust finding.
Inferring emotional context from what we hear
Another key outcome of the project, which received support from the European Research Council, was its work on how people can infer behavioural contexts from spontaneous non-verbal vocalisations such as sighs and grunts. Here, researchers sought to determine whether listeners can infer the specific behavioural context a person is in when they vocalise. “When we hear another person laugh or scream, we wanted to know whether listeners can tell the kind of situation they are in – for example, if they are playing or fighting,” notes Sauter. What they found was that we can indeed infer contexts from non-verbal vocalisations, suggesting that listeners are sensitive to systematic mappings between acoustic structures in vocalisations and behavioural contexts. This research was reported in a paper published in ‘Cognition and Emotion’.
A solid foundation for future research into positive emotions
The PEP project produced research and data that not only received considerable interest both inside and outside academia, but will serve as an important foundation for future research initiatives. For instance, many of its findings have been used to map specific patterns of facial and vocal expressions of spontaneous positive emotions. “We have stimulated research into positive emotions and highlighted the need for differentiating between different positive emotions and for studying real-world emotional experiences and expressions,” concludes Sauter. Already building on the achievements of the PEP project, Sauter is currently researching the relations between positive emotions and sustainability. Meanwhile, her research group is using a machine learning approach developed as part of PEP data to further investigate emotions in the voice.
Keywords
PEP, emotions, positive emotions, calm, hope, well-being, emotional context, machine learning
