The Hoosier Vocal Emotions Corpus: A validated set of North American English pseudo-words for evaluating emotion processing

This article presents the development of the “Hoosier Vocal Emotions Corpus,” a stimulus set of recorded pseudo-words based on the pronunciation rules of English. The corpus contains 73 controlled audio pseudo-words uttered by two actresses in five different emotions (i.e., happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust) and in a neutral tone, yielding 1,763 audio files. In this article, we describe the corpus as well as a validation study of the pseudo-words. A total of 96 native English speakers completed a forced choice emotion identification task. All emotions were recognized better than chance overall, with substantial variability among the different tokens. All of the recordings, including the ambiguous stimuli, are made freely available, and the recognition rates and the full confusion matrices for each stimulus are provided in order to assist researchers and clinicians in the selection of stimuli. The corpus has unique characteristics that can be useful for experimental paradigms that require controlled stimuli (e.g., electroencephalographic or fMRI studies). Stimuli from this corpus could be used by researchers and clinicians to answer a variety of questions, including investigations of emotion processing in individuals with certain temperamental or behavioral characteristics associated with difficulties in emotion recognition (e.g., individuals with psychopathic traits); in bilingual individuals or nonnative English speakers; in patients with aphasia, schizophrenia, or other mental health disorders (e.g., depression); or in training automatic emotion recognition algorithms. The Hoosier Vocal Emotions Corpus is available at https://psycholinguistics.indiana.edu/hoosiervocalemotions.htm .