The Mandarin Chinese auditory emotions stimulus database: A validated corpus of monosyllabic Chinese characters.

Abstract

Auditory emotional rhythm can be transmitted by simple syllables. This study aimed to establish and validate an auditory speech dataset containing Mandarin Chinese auditory emotional monosyllables (MCAE-Monosyllable), a resource that has not been previously available. A total of 422 Chinese monosyllables were recorded by six professional Mandarin actors, each expressing seven emotions: neutral, happy, angry, sad, fearful, disgusted, and surprised. Additionally, each neutral voice was recorded in four Chinese tones. After standardization and energy balance, the recordings were evaluated by 720 Chinese college students for emotional categories (forced to choose one out of seven emotions) and emotional intensity (rated on a scale of 1-9). The final dataset consists of 18,089 valid Chinese monosyllabic pronunciations (neutrality: 9425, sadness: 2453, anger: 2024; surprise: 1699, disgust: 1624, happiness: 590, fear: 274). On average, neutrality had the highest accuracy rate (79%), followed by anger (75%) and sadness (75%), surprise (74%), happiness (73%), disgust (72%), and finally fear (67%). We provided detailed validation results, acoustic information, and perceptual intensity rating values for each sound. The MCAE-Monosyllable database serves as a valuable resource for neural decoding of Chinese emotional speech, cross-cultural language research, and behavioral or clinical studies related to language and emotional disorders. The database can be obtained within the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/h3uem/?view_only=047dfd08dbb64ad0882410da340aa271 ).