FACTORS OF ENVIRONMENTAL SOUNDS THAT INFLUENCE PEOPLE'S AFFECTIVE RESPONSES IN TERMS OF THE MAJOR EMOTIONAL DIMENSIONS

摘要

Environmental sounds and noises continuously influence people's emotional states, and evoke specific affective responses/feelings, both positive and negative, such as pleasantness, annoyance, excitement, and stress. The question of what factors influence people's affective responses to environmental sounds has interested many researchers throughout the years. By studying a variety of perceptual and affective attributes (in semantic differential scales) of sounds environments, a large number of research studies supported the view that emotions can be represented in a low-dimensional affective space, with two or three major emotional dimensions. Consequently, research on the above question regarding various affective responses can focus on the emotional dimensions. The present paper, thus, examines the factors of environmental sounds that influence people's affective responses in terms of the three major emotional dimensions commonly found, i.e. valence (from unpleasant to pleasant), arousal (from calm to excited), and dominance. This study is conducted on the large set of environmental sound samples of the International Affective Digitized Sounds with their normative affective ratings on each of the three emotional dimensions. It analyses a range of acoustic and psychoacoustic properties of the sound samples, as well as certain basic semantic properties such as categories of environmental sounds. It then examines the relationships between the properties and the affective ratings, using a number of statistical methods including regression analyses. The results show that similar to previous research, the correlations between the acoustic/psychoacoustic properties and the emotional dimensions are not high when considering together all the environmental sound samples; however, if grouping the sound samples into semantic categories, e.g. alarm, household, animals, nature, traffic, and music, the correlations increase substantially within each category. The results suggest that both the semantic properties and acoustic/psychoacoustic properties are important factors that work together to influence people's affective responses to environmental sounds.