Decoding Emotion: Speech Perception Patterns in Individuals with Self-reported Depression
Guneesh Vats, Priyanka Srivastava, Chiranjeevi Yarra
TL;DR
This study investigates how self-reported depression influences perception of affective speech in an Indian population, addressing a gap in culturally contextual data. It uses PANAS-10 and PHQ-9 to classify mood and an affective-speech perception task with IEMOCAP-derived stimuli across four emotions, capturing valence/arousal judgments and reaction times. The results show no broad depression-related deficits in emotion perception, except for lower valence ratings to neutral stimuli in the depressed group, while PANAS reveals higher negative affect among those with depression. The findings underscore the importance of culturally relevant stimuli and methods when assessing affective speech processing in subclinical depression, suggesting further work with Indianized speech materials and robust mood assessments.
Abstract
The current study examines the relationship between self-reported depression and the perception of affective speech within the Indian population. PANAS and PHQ-9 were used to assess current mood and depression, respectively. Participants' emotional reactivity was recorded on a valence and arousal scale against the affective speech audio presented in a sequence. No significant differences between the depression and no-depression groups were observed for any of the emotional stimuli, except the audio file depicting neutral emotion. Significantly higher PANAS scores by the depression than the no-depression group indicate the impact of pre-disposed mood on the current mood status. Contrary to previous findings, this study did not observe reduced positive emotional reactivity by the depression group. However, the results demonstrated consistency in emotional reactivity for speech stimuli depicting sadness and anger across all measures of emotion perception.