Decoding whispered vocalizations: relationships between social and emotional variables

Whispered vocalizations are wide-spread across human cultures. We studied the perceptional evaluation of this universal display and addressed specially its role in mediating particular emotions. This was done by investigating how human subjects (n=210; age: 22-30 years) judged different sets of auditory stimuli; i.e., different sentences presented in whispered or normally spoken language (control). In addition, we varied the quality of emotions encoded in the stimuli and tested also effects of signal transmission via telephone. Judgements were extracted from audiovisual recordings and from self-report data collected after each trial. Data analyses revealed that the decoding of emotions was almost equally good for whispered and spoken stimuli, and also not markedly impaired when filtered by a phone. Often, however, judgements were affected by social prejudice which could result in bimodal distributions of ratings (e.g. 'sympathetic' vs. 'unsympathetic'). The results suggested that listeners who feel socially excluded tend to judge whispering negatively.