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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Ooh, surprise! Those spontaneous sounds we make to express everything from elation (woohoo) to embarrassment (oops) say a lot more about what we're feeling than previously understood, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley.

Proving that a sigh is not just a sigh, UC Berkeley scientists conducted a statistical analysis of listener responses to more than 2,000 nonverbal exclamations known as "vocal bursts" and found they convey at least 24 kinds of emotion. Previous studies of vocal bursts set the number of recognizable emotions closer to 13.

The results, recently published online in the American Psychologist journal, are demonstrated in vivid sound and color on the first-ever interactive audio map of nonverbal vocal communication.

"This study is the most extensive demonstration of our rich emotional vocal repertoire, involving brief signals of upwards of two dozen emotions as intriguing as awe, adoration, interest, sympathy and embarrassment," said study senior author Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, which helped support the research.

[...] "Our findings show that the voice is a much more powerful tool for expressing emotion than previously assumed," said study lead author Alan Cowen, a Ph.D. student in psychology at UC Berkeley.

On Cowen's audio map, one can slide one's cursor across the emotional topography and hover over fear (scream), then surprise (gasp), then awe (woah), realization (ohhh), interest (ah?) and finally confusion (huh?).

Journal Reference:
Alan S. Cowen, Hillary Anger Elfenbein, Petri Laukka, Dacher Keltner. Mapping 24 emotions conveyed by brief human vocalization.. American Psychologist, 2018; DOI: 10.1037/amp0000399

That means you can rely on your feelings when you hear your surgeon say "Oops!"

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission