Hoosier Vocal Emotions Collection:
A validated set of North American English pseudo-words for evaluating emotion processing
Darcy, I., & Fontaine, N. M. G. (2020). The Hoosier Vocal Emotions Corpus: A validated set of North American English pseudo-words for evaluating emotion processing. Behavior Research Methods, 52(2), 901-917. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01288-0[pdf]
In this paper, we describe the corpus (rather: the collection) as well as a validation study of the pseudo-words. A total of 96 native English speakers completed a forced-choice emotion identification task. All emotions were recognized better than chance overall, with substantial variability among the different tokens.
The "Hoosier Vocal Emotions Corpus" is a stimulus set of recorded pseudo-words based on the pronunciation rules of English. The collection contains 73 controlled audio pseudo-words uttered by two actresses in five different emotions (i.e., happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust) and in a neutral tone, yielding 1,763 audio files.
All recordings, including ambiguous stimuli, are made freely available on this site, and the recognition rates and the full confusion matrices for each stimulus are provided to assist researchers and clinicians in the selection of stimuli.
The corpus has unique characteristics that can be useful for experimental paradigms requiring controlled stimuli (e.g., EEG or fMRI studies). Stimuli from this corpus could be used by researchers and clinicians to answer a variety of questions, including investigations of emotion processing in individuals with certain temperamental or behavioral characteristics associated with difficulties in emotion recognition (e.g., individuals with psychopathic traits), in bilingual individuals or non-native English speakers, in patients with aphasia, schizophrenia or other mental health disorders (e.g., depression), or in training automatic emotion recognition algorithms.
This project was funded by an Indiana University grant to Nathalie Fontaine (PI), John E Bates and Isabelle Darcy (co-PIs).
Support was provided by the Department of Criminal Justice; Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences; Department of Second Language Studies (Indiana University, USA) and by the Département de Criminologie (Université de Montréal, Canada)
We acknowledge the collaboration of the following people: Gabriela Cepeda, Peace Han, Franziska Krüger, Trisha Thomas, Chung-Lin Yang, and Joshua Lee.
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Listen to a few sample audio files
Clicking on these links will play the sound (a new window with your computer's audio player will open)
Studies that have used the corpus so far
- Hoyniak, C.P., Bates, J.E., Petersen, I.T., Yang, C.-L., Darcy, I., & Fontaine, N.M.G. (2018). Reduced neural responses to vocal fear: A potential biomarker for callous-uncaring traits in early childhood. Developmental Science, 21, e12608. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12608 [pdf]
- Hoyniak, C.P., Bates, J.E., Petersen, I.T. et al. Diminished Neural Responses to Emotionally Valenced Facial Stimuli: A Potential Biomarker for Unemotional Traits in Early Childhood. Child Psychiatry Hum Dev 50, 72–82 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-018-0821-9 [pdf]
- Matos, P. V. de O. S., Andrade, R. S. S., Rehder, M. I. B. C., Guedes-Granzotti, R. B., Silva, K. da ., & César, C. P. H. A. R.. (2024). Emotional prosody recognition using pseudowords from the Hoosier Vocal Emotions Collection. Revista CEFAC, 26(5), e3624. https://doi.org/10.1590/1982-0216/20242653624 [pdf]