Significance of Vocal and Visual Channels in the Decoding of Emotional Meaning

Human communicative behavior can be viewed as functioning through three channels: the verbal, (nonverbal) vocal and visual. The present study sought to assess the relative effectiveness of the (nonverbal) vocal and visual channels in influencing observers' judgment of communicative stimuli. Observers were asked to judge various protrayals of feeling state on film, from which certain cue components had been systematically removed. Judgments from visual cues were found to be more accurate as measured against the (audio visual) criterion than were judgments from vocal cues.