D for danger! Speech sounds convey emotions

(Bocconi University) Individual speech sounds -- phonemes -- are statistically associated with negative or positive emotions in several languages, new research published in the journal Cognition by Bocconi Professor Zachary Estes, his Warwick colleague James Adelman and Bocconi student Martina Cossu shows. These associations help us quickly avoid dangers, because the phoneme-emotion associations are strongest at the beginning of the word and the phonemes that are spoken fastest tend to have a negative association
Source: EurekAlert! - Social and Behavioral Science - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: news