Tone of Voice and Mind : The Connections between Intonation ...

94 Chapter 4
also entail a variety of effects in modalities other than the auditory – the entire
repertoire of somatic effects elicited by the autonomic nervous system, as well
as facial expressions and bodily gestures, so that the questions of emotion could
be approached from other directions. The auditory approach is, however, more
direct primarily because the auditory component has an older communicative
history than the visual.
To explain the relationship between pitch and emotion, some basic terminology
must be defined. First of all, a distinction will be made here between
feelings and emotions. The term “emotion” will be used strictly to denote the
affect human beings feel in relation to other human beings, whereas the term
“feeling” will be used to denote a broader category that includes the entire set of
uncontrolled, non-verbal, autonomic nervous system responses to (normally)
external stimuli. If the wind causes a door to slam shut, a hairy spider suddenly
appears on my plate, or I take a ride on a roller-coaster, strong feelings will
be experienced. Without any thought or conscious deliberation, my body will
react with autonomic responses, including a racing heart, profuse sweating, irregular
breathing, shaking knees, and so on. Those feelings may be powerful,
but they are rather contentless in terms of human relations. If, however, the
slamming door or the ugly spider or the roller-coaster ride somehow involve
people, as causal agents, victims or cohorts, then, in addition to the autonomic
feelings, I will experience human emotions of pity, joy, anger, sympathy, worry,
sadness, etc. with regard to those people. Although many discussions of emotion
include the feelings experienced in response to physical events, any theory
that includes both anonymous feelings and human emotions is unlikely to be
more than a catalog of the autonomic responses that different kinds of stimuli
can induce. The present discussion of emotion will therefore focus on human
emotions in a social context.
Next, it is important to make a distinction between an emotional state and
the specific life events that gave rise to the emotion. Raw emotions do not occur
in the abstract; they are psychological responses to events involving people
– social events that have a duration, location and causality of their own.
Those social events constitute the real-world “contents” of emotions, and are
unique in every individual’s life. The psychological states that life events engender,
however, can be categorized with a commonality among people – generally
speaking, across cultures, across races and across generations. It is this common,
finite set of definable human emotions that is the subject matter of the
present chapter. How many “fundamental emotions” there might be and what
kinds of life events can cause them are topics too large to be addressed here, but
a related, more tractable topic can be delineated: the expression of emotional