What Do Vocal Bursts Reveal About Human Emotions?

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In a recent article in the American Psychologist:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-02-gasp-audio-oohs-aahs-uh-ohs.html

Researchers have mapped out 24 different emotions expressed as Oohs and Ahhs and related spontaneous sounds:

Ooh, surprise! Those spontaneous sounds we make to express everything from elation (woohoo) to embarrassment (oops) say a lot more about what we're feeling than previously understood, according to new UC Berkeley research.Proving that a sigh is not just a sigh, scientists conducted a statistical analysis of listener responses to more than 2,000 nonverbal exclamations known as "vocal bursts" and found they convey at least 24 kinds of emotion. Previous studies of vocal bursts set the number of recognizable emotions closer to 13.
 
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.Scott said:
They created this interactive map:
https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vocs/map.html#
In 2013, the word "huh?" was called a universal word by a study, meaning that it is the same in all languages.
It is supposed to used to in response to someone saying something which was not clearly understood.
Based upon that, I was able to find huh in the diagram. There are few of them about half way between "confusion" and "interest", which makes sense based on its being a request for clarification.
The huh? article contends that:
Huh? is a universal word not because it is innate but because it is shaped by selective pressures in an interactional environment that all languages share: that of other-initiated repair.
 
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Tom.G said:
Male of female voice? Was your office door open or closed? :blushing:
LOL. Female voice, and my current office environment is open top cubicles, with the walls only about 1.5m tall.
 
Way cool. In Southern India, among Tamil & Malayalam speakers, there's an interjection, "Aiyoo!" which, depending on the inflection conveys either positive surprise/approbation or (somewhat) negative surprise/reproval. English has no equivalent, but it's fun to say and useful to convey emotion. I couldn't find the equivalent on the map, but I was somewhat limited by my tablet.

Here's the link to the PNAS article (open access):
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/38/E7900
 
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It is pretty widespread cop lore that if a subject who is being questioned (in a field situation, like a traffic stop or a sidewalk conversation or such) says "Huh?" pretty much anything that follows will be lies.

I am not a cop, and cannot authoritatively confirm this, but I have heard this many times.

diogenesNY
 
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