This study is concerned with the expression and recognition of basic emotions in blind and sighted people. We collected audiovisual recordings from blind and sighted people who were asked to produce specific utterances in such a way that they would fit different emotional contexts (i.e., angry, happy, sad, scared). In a perception experiment, 75 sighted participants had to guess which emotion from a blind or sighted person was enacted in one of three conditions (audio-only, video-only, audiovisual). While emotions expressed by sighted people were comparatively more easy to judge in audiovisual and video-only presentations, it turned out to be the case that emotions of blind people were more often correctly classified in the audio-only condition. Interestingly, the general patterns in classification accuracy were remarkably similar across conditions, and across speaker type.

Index Terms: blind and sighted people, audiovisual prosody, emotional expressions