Deciphering others’ affect is ubiquitous in daily life and is important for navigating social interactions and relationships. Research has found that behavioral components, such as facial expressions or body language, are critical channels by which people understand other people’s affect. In the current research, we examined how people’s perceptions of targets’ positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) are associated with targets’ physiological reactivity, and whether behavioral indices mediate these associations. A total of 94 participants (i.e., observers) watched videos of targets completing a social stress task during which targets’ physiological reactivity [i.e., changes in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), cardiac output (CO), and ventricular contractility (VC)] was assessed. We predicted (1) targets’ RSA reactivity would be negatively associated with observers’ perceptions of PA and NA (to a lesser magnitude than PA); (2) targets’ CO reactivity would be positively associated with observers’ perceptions of PA and unrelated to perceptions of NA; and (3) targets’ VC would be positively associated perceptions of PA or NA (VC was an exploratory hypothesis). Our hypotheses were largely supported. Mediational analyses revealed that vocal prosody was a significant mediator of the association between perceptions of targets’ affect and their physiological reactivity. The findings suggest that observers can reliably detect targets’ emotional experiences as they manifest at a physiological level and that voice is an especially useful marker of how people perceive others’ affective experience. The findings have implications for aspects of relationships involving emotion perception, including affect contagion and interpersonal emotion regulation.

中文翻译：

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生理和声音在社会压力下的情绪感知中的作用

解密他人的影响在日常生活中无处不在，对于导航社交互动和关系非常重要。研究发现，诸如面部表情或肢体语言之类的行为成分是人们了解他人影响的重要渠道。在当前的研究中，我们研究了人们对目标的积极影响（PA）和负面影响（NA）的感知如何与目标的生理反应性相关，以及行为指标是否介导了这些关联。共有94位参与者（即观察员）观看了目标完成社会压力任务的视频，在此过程中目标的生理反应性（即呼吸窦性心律不齐（RSA），心输出量（CO）和心室收缩力（VC）的变化）被评估。我们预测（1）目标的RSA反应性与观察者对PA和NA的感知负相关（幅度小于PA）；（2）目标的一氧化碳反应性与观察者对PA的感知成正相关，与NA的感知无关。（3）目标的VC是对PA或NA的正相关知觉（VC是一种探索性假设）。我们的假设在很大程度上得到了支持。中介分析表明，声调是目标情感和生理反应之间的重要中介。这些发现表明，观察者可以可靠地检测到目标在生理层面上表现出来的情感体验，并且声音是人们如何看待他人情感体验的特别有用的标记。