Relationship Between Empathy and Understanding Others’ Vocally Expressed Emotions

Abstract

  The present study explored how others' emotions are comprehended from their vocal expressions and examined the relationship between empathy and the understanding of others' emotions through their vocal expressions. High school students (N=317) were asked to identify vocal expressions intended to express joy, sadness, and anger, using both the selection method and open-ended questions. Empathy was measured using the Cognitive and Emotional Empathy Scale for Children (Murakami et al., 2014). With the selection method, the participants had difficulty identifying the expression of sadness. Rather, they selected joy and anger as the intention in those recordings. Quantitative analyses of their text responses found similarities between joy and anger. This suggests that vocal expressions meant as joy may be misinterpreted as anger. The results from the measure of empathy suggested that those who tended to share others' positive emotions or who respected others' positive emotions identified others' vocal expressions of joy more accurately.