International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Human emotionality is an ongoing stream that pervades every aspect of social life, talk, conversation, and discourse. Emotions are appraisals of situations; they have somatic bodily characteristics and their expressions can take nonverbal forms (facial, vocal, posture; →  emotion ). Theoretical approaches to the emotional dimensions of discourse are found within three traditions of research: psychology of emotions, sociology of emotions, and psycho- and socio-linguistics. Although Charles Darwin's pioneering work in this field emphasized that different emotions are expressed in particular ways on a vocal level as well as a facial level, the vocal level has been rather ignored, both in classical psychological works ( Tomkins 1963 ) and in the later development of this field. The same tendency has characterized the development of psycholinguistic research. A number of laboratory studies of vocal expressions of emotions have, however, been undertaken in recent years; some are designed to measure acoustic characteristics with the aid of technological instruments; others are based on observers’ coding of vocal behaviors ( Pittam 1994 ). These studies demonstrate a relationship between emotions and their vocal expressions; between, e.g., joy, anger, fear, and different patterns of pitch, loudness, and speed. Conversational and discourse analytical studies of vocal behavior should also ... log in or subscribe to read full text