Samenvatting

Terug: PRE_Groep2

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Inleiding

--> Suzanne

• onderzoeksvraag: Wat is het effect op de belevingswereld van de mens door het toevoegen van emotie aan een grammaticaal emotionele zin?
• Hypotheses ahv bronnen opstellen.

We verwachten dat de stem met emotie een positieve invloed heeft op onze 3 y-variabelen. Likeability en animacy hebben hoogstwaarschijnlijk weer invloed op overtuigingskracht. (Bron: creating more credible and persuasive recommender systems. --> week 3, bronnen presuasiveness)

• Maatschappelijke invloed/ belang/ doel
• Prior research
• etc.

Introduction

Freedom is valuable to humans. It is so important that their right for freedom is protected by the constitution and several human right organizations. Freedom is related to both the physical- and mental state and it can be limited or taken away. Muscles diseases take away a person’s freedom on a physical level.

A muscular disease that recently gained more attention is ALS. Mainly because of the ‘ice bucket challenge’ that went all over Facebook. The idea of the campaign was to gain more awareness for this disease so that money would be raised for further research. With ALS the neurons that are responsible for muscles movement will stop functioning over time (BRON). Groups of muscles lose their function in a random order. This process continues until vital muscles, like the heart, are no longer triggered by neurons. During their illness people who suffer from ALS feel like a prisoner in their own body. Their freedom is decreasing in multiple ways. For example at some point they may not be able to express themselves verbally as the vocal cords are muscles and can stop functioning.

There is a company (BRON) that that tries to help people with ALS by giving them back their voice. They record the voice of ALS patients prior to the muscle failure, so that those recordings can be used in speech technology. Instead of hearing a computerized sound, ALS patients can hear their own voice when their ability to speak is impaired. This creates a stronger emotional bond between the patient and the loved ones surrounding them. Although such technology exists the company feels that it can be improved by adding emotions to the voice recordings.

There are researches that have investigated the features of particular emotions (BRONNEN). These findings could be implemented in a speech program to add an emotion to a sentence. Although some emotions were recognized based on those features it was difficult for the sample group to successfully recognize certain emotions like sadness. Other studies came with an explanation for this problem. They state that emotion cannot be recognized by physical features alone (BRON). It is a combination of physical features (pitch, frequency, etc.), anatomical features (gestures, facial expressions) and grammatical features (selection of words). Of course patients with ALS can no longer express themselves anatomically after a certain time. Nevertheless it is important to find the best possible way for these patients to express themselves verbally, because it gives them an increased sense of freedom.

Therefore this research only looks at the combination of physical features and grammatical features. The goal is not to look further into the characteristics of emotions, but to investigate the strength of the combination of just the physical- and anatomical features. At first this research starts with sentences without emotion, but who express emotion grammatically. The sentence ‘You did so great, I thought it was amazing’ expresses the emotion ‘happy’ because of the words that were chosen. But how large or powerful is the effect when adding physical features of emotions? This question leads to the hypothesis of this research:

What is the effect on the perception of humans by adding physical features of emotions to a sentence with grammatical emotional features?

Based on the knowledge of prior research a sentence with both physical and grammatical features should be more convincing. This research will look at how strong that effect is.

The outcome of this research can be used in speech technology for patients who suffer from ALS, but its use has a broader implementation. It can be used when no anatomical features of emotions are available, but when it is still necessary to communicate a certain emotion. With persuasive technology for example there are devices that want to convince people to behave in a certain way. Some devices use only voice recordings instead of an avatar. In these cases the use of physical- and grammatical features could have a stronger effect on the convincingness of the device which leads to the wanted change of behavior.

Methode

• Materials Google docs + welke programma's voor stemmen. hoe de stemmen zijn gemaakt/ wat hebben gedaan. --> Floor

• Design

Before we executed our experiment we did a power analysis to have an idea how many participants we might needed. For our power analysis we set the power to 0.8 at a significance level of 0.05. For a moderate effect size we needed 64 participants for each condition in a two-tailed t-test and 51 participants for each condition in a one-tailed t-test. We agreed that a one-tailed t-test would be suitable for our experiment, because we suspect no relation or a positive relation. We did not think that there would be a negative relation. Therefore there is only one way in which there would be an effect and a two-tailed t-test would not be needed. However, it is presumably that the effect size is small instead of moderate. We executed another power analysis to see how many participants we needed if the effect size is small. For a two-tailed t-test we would need 394 participants per condition and for a one-tailed 310 participants per condition. Because we did not have the resources and time to collect so many participants we chose to execute the experiment with 51 participants per condition and hoped for a moderate effect.

For our experiment we used a between subjects design. The two conditions researched were emotionally loaded voices and neutral voices. Each group only heard one of the conditions. These two conditions made up our independent variable, which therefore is a categorical variable. The dependent variables were likeability, animacy and persuasiveness. All these variables consisted of a Likert scale varying from 1 to 5. All the dependent variables are interval variables.The dependent variables were composed of several questions in the questionnaire. For the dependent variable likeability we used the questions 27, 30, 35, 38 and 40 from the questionnaire. Questions 28, 31, 32 and 34 were used for the dependent variable animacy. And for the dependent variable persuasiveness, questions 29, 33, 36 and 37 were used.

Because our survey is about water consumption and persuadibility we made two variables which could be of influence on the way participants responded on the comments of Will. These covariates are how easy you are to convince and how much you care about the environment. Both covariates are composed of several questions in the questionnaire. How easy you are to convince is composed of the questions 5, 8, 13 and 18. How much you care about the environment is composed of the questions 4, 6, 10, 11, 12, 15, 17 and 19.

• Procedure

Each participant received a questionnaire. This questionnaire contained three parts. The first part is the general one in which some demographic information was asked. Besides some questions were asked about two personal characteristics. Furthermore, some questions were included to prevent that participants directly knew about our research goal. The second part consisted of a simulation in which everyone was supposed to fill in some questions about their showering habits. After each answer, an audio fragment was heard which either gave positive or negative feedback. The third part contained questions about the experience of the voice heard. At last, we added some final questions to give us an indication about general matters such as concentration and comprehensibility.

• Participanten

The participants (n = ….) were personally asked to fill in the questionnaire. They were gathered from our list of friends on our Facebook accounts. We used Facebook to prevent that elderly, which are unable to change their showering habits due to living in a care home, filled in the questionnaire. Besides, we only asked people older than 18, since younger people do often not pay their own energy bill.

Each participant got either the questionnaire with the neutral voice (n1 = ….) or with the voice that sounds emotionally loaded (n2 = …..). The condition with the neutral voice is called category 1, and the other condition is called category 2.

The first category consisted of …. men and … women, and their age was between … and …. (M = …, SD = …). The second category consisted … men and .. .women, and their age was between … and…. (M = .., SD = ..).The highest completed degree of education differed among primary school (…%; ...%), mavo (..%;….%), havo, vwo (…%;…%), mbo (…%;….%), hbo (..%;…%), and university (..%;..%). The first value is for category 1, and the second is for category 2.

Discussie

Evt. vervolgonderzoek: we vonden een ander TTS programma awarin je specifieke geluidjes kan toevoegen aan de uitspraak. Zoals 'snik' of 'wow'. Misschien hebben dit soort extra geluidjes wel veel meer effect dan de daadwerkelijke emotie in de stem.