I doubt it is halfway between low and high arousal nor halfway between negative and positive valence. Does anyone know where listeners rate emotionally "neutral", conversational speech?
Hi Shae, I am not sure if conversational speech can ever be neutral. And even if some conversations may be rated 'neutral', others may not. And some raters may not agree with others ... I would assume that conversational speech may be somewhat above 50% arousal, for valence I am not sure. Xaver
Hi, I think neutral speech falls on the positive side of valence. According to literature a news reader is considered to be an example for exhibiting neutral speech. And he/she tends to be somewhat in between happy and content when reading a news which falls exactly on the positive side of valence. So, according to my perception neutral speech falls on the positive side of valence.
I read this somewhere in the RAVDESS paper (Article The Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and So...
): "Many studies incorporate a neutral or ªno emotionº control condition. However, neutral expressions have produced mixed perceptual results [70], at times conveying a negative emotional valence [71]. Researchers have suggested that this may be due to uncertainty on the part of the performer as to how neutral should be conveyed [66]. To compensate for this a calm baseline condition has been included, which is perceptually like neutral, but may be perceived as having a mild positive valence."Intuitively, neutral would be a low arousal state to me so I bet listeners would judge it like so. Based on the excerpt above, I would expect listeners to perceive such utterances as slightly negative in valence on average.
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