Recognition of Emotional Tone of Information: The Problem of Universality

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the degree of universality of the recognition of emotional coloring of information for three types of stimuli: human behavior, music, and non-musical sound stimuli. It is proposed to differentiate between two aspects in the recognition of emotional coloring of information: accuracy and sensitivity. The accuracy refers to the ability to adequately recognise the ratio of different modalities of emotion in emotional coloring of stimuli. The sensitivity refers to the tendency to exaggerate (or understate) the severity of emotional coloring of stimuli. It is suggested that the accuracy is more related to the crystallised aspect of the ability to recognize emotions and sensitivity – to the fluid aspect of the same ability. This leads to a hypothesis that sensitivity as an individual characteristic is more universal in a sense that it is manifested in a relatively similar way for different types of stimuli, whereas the accuracy is more specific to the type of stimuli. Three techniques were developed to measure accuracy and sensitivity in recognition of emotional coloring of three different types of stimuli. The techniques were carried out on a sample of 37 people. The sensitivity indices obtained by three different techniques had high internal consistency and high positive correlations with each other (0.8 to 0.9), whereas the accuracy indices were less consistent and weakly correlated with one another. This proves the hypotheses tested. The limitations of the results are discussed, especially in relation to the possible extreme response style in Likert scales. Some ways to overcome these limitations in future research are suggested.