Jo-Anne Bachorowski Christopher D. Linker Michael J. Owren
Dept. of Psychol., Univ. of Colorado, Campus Box 173, P. O. Box 173364, Denver, CO 80217-3364
Comprehensive models of personality regard individual differences in emotional responding as important mediators of behavior across a variety of contexts. However, traditional psychophysiological and self-report measures are often unreliable or unwieldy when applied to emotional responses. Several acoustic features were examined as indices of changes in emotional state. Adult subjects were given noncontingent positive and negative feedback as they participated in a computerized lexical decision task. Acoustic components were extracted from discrete speech segments recorded immediately following feedback. In comparison to baseline recordings, higher F0 values were associated with both positive and negative feedback. However, changes in jitter and shimmer were differentially associated with the type of feedback in that increases in these perturbation measures were especially apparent following negative feedback. The results of this research will be used to elaborate the cognitive and emotional processing of trait-anxious and trait-impulsive individuals in contexts designed to engender anxious and impulsive behavioral responses.