Similarities in emotion perception from faces and voices

Evidence From Emotion Sorting Tasks

Bibliographic Data

ID7149941
AuthorsNadine Lavan (0000-0001-7569-0817, Queen Mary University of London, corresponding author), Aleena Ahmed (Queen Mary University of London), Chantelle Tyrene Oteng (Queen Mary University of London), Munira Aden (Queen Mary University of London), Luisa Nasciemento-Krüger (Queen Mary University of London), Zahra Raffiq (Queen Mary University of London), Isabelle Mareschal (0000-0003-4378-600X, Queen Mary University of London)
Year2026
Volume40
Issue1
Pages1-17
Publication date2026-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCognition & Emotion (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0269-9931 • E-ISSN: 1464-0600
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/02699931.2025.2478478
PMID40088052
OpenAlexW4408481215
LanguageEN
References cited75

Emotions are expressed via many features including facial displays, vocal intonation, and touch, and perceivers can often interpret emotional displays across the different modalities with high accuracy. Here, we examine how emotion perception from faces and voices relates to one another, probing individual differences in emotion recognition abilities across visual and auditory modalities. We developed a novel emotion sorting task, in which participants were tasked with freely grouping different stimuli into perceived emotional categories, without requiring pre-defined emotion labels. Participants completed two emotion sorting tasks, one using silent videos of facial expressions, the other with audio recordings of vocal expressions. We furthermore manipulated the emotional intensity, contrasting more subtle, lower intensity vs higher intensity emotion portrayals. We find that participants' performance on the emotion sorting task was similar for face and voice stimuli. As expected, performance was lower when stimuli were of low emotional intensity. Consistent with previous reports, we find that task performance was positively correlated across the two modalities. Our findings show that emotion perception in the visual and auditory modalities may be underpinned by similar and/or shared processes, highlighting that emotion sorting tasks are powerful paradigms to investigate emotion recognition from voices, cross-modal and multimodal emotion recognition

Anger · Cognitive psychology · Disgust · Emotion classification · Emotion Perception · Emotion work · Face perception · Negative emotion · Perception · Social perception · Sorting · Computer Science · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · Face Recognition and Perception · Multisensory perception and integration · Psychology · Social Psychology

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