Why people easily misunderstand emotions
Happiness, anger, sadness? Interpreting emotions is more difficult than you might think
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We scream, groan, squeak and sigh – and express anger, anger, joy or other feelings. The problem: our counterpart often cannot really say what we are feeling. Researchers are now attempting to explain this emotional paradox.
SScreaming, squeaking, roaring: the more intensely feelings are expressed through sounds, the easier it is to misunderstand them. At least that is what research at the Frankfurt Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Empirical Aesthetics suggests. “The connection is paradoxical,” says Natalie Holz. The neuroscientist is doing her doctorate on this topic and is the first author of two specialist articles. Most people would intuitively assume the opposite: the stronger the emotion and its emotional expression, the better they will be understood.
For their analysis, Holz had more than 1000 audio snippets recorded of non-verbal sounds such as screaming, laughing, sighing, groaning and groaning. 480 of them were played to 90 study participants.
After each snippet these questions had to be answered: Which emotion is being expressed here? How intense is this feeling? Is it positive or negative? The scientists then examined how the audience’s perception of sounds changed depending on the emotional intensity.
“The result surprised us,” says Holz: As expected, the perception of emotions initially improved with increasing emotion intensity. But the stronger the intensity became above a certain threshold, the less correctly it was assessed.
In the case of extremely strong emotions, the hit rate even dropped drastically. In the case of extremely intense feelings, the listeners could no longer reliably differentiate between individual emotions – for example, surprise or triumph. They were also no longer able to say with certainty whether the feeling was more positive or negative. Screams of pain and screams of joy sounded similar to her.
“We have found out that the most intense feelings cannot be best interpreted. On the contrary, they are the most misleading of all, ”summarizes the neuroscientist. Nevertheless, the signals are not insignificant: both the intensity and the state of arousal are clearly perceived. “In extreme situations, it may be more important to recognize the relevance and to be alarmed than to identify the nuanced emotional meaning.”
The first results of the study were published in May in the journal “Scientific Reports”. New York University and the Max Planck NYU Center for Language, Music, and Emotion were also involved in it. A second publication on the audio database on which the experiments are based is due to appear in the journal “Emotion” at the end of the year.
Whether it is anger or sadness is not that important
Scientists at Frankfurt’s Goethe University have also dealt with feelings. Claudius Gros from the Institute for Theoretical Physics investigated the question of why evolution has endowed us with emotions in the first place. The results were published in the journal “Frontiers In Computational Neuroscience”.
In order to make decisions, according to Gros, living beings with complex options for action need a mechanism that significantly reduces the cognitive requirements: “That is what emotions make possible.” Accordingly, they help to compare different activities so that goals and tasks can be selected efficiently can be.
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