The Mandarin Chinese Auditory Emotions Stimulus Database: A Validated Set of Subject Personal Pronoun Sentences (MCAE-SPPS)

When expressing emotions in daily life, sentences with different personal pronouns as the subject may bring listeners different emotional experiences. This study established and validated an auditory emotional speech dataset consisting of sentences with three types of Mandarin Chinese Personal Pronouns (I and We, singular You and plural You, singular third-person, and They) as the subject, an unprecedented resource. Six professional Mandarin actors (three men and three women) expressed two hundred meaningful Chinese sentences in neutral and six basic emotional tones: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. Seven hundred and twenty Chinese college students evaluated the 8400 recordings for emotional categories (a one out of seven-force choose task) and intensity (a scale of 1-9). The final dataset consists of 7579 valid Chinese subject pronoun sentences (Neutrality: 1608; Sadness: 1324; Anger: 1167; Surprise: 1076; Disgust: 797; Happiness: 855; Fear: 752; First/Second/Thirds personal pronouns sentences: 3085, 2975, and 1519). Recognition rates for the emotions were as follows: neutrality (82%), sadness (80%), anger (78%), surprise (72%), happiness (65%), disgust (62%), and fear (60%). We provided each sound’s raw data, validation results, perceptual intensity rating scores, and acoustic information. This personal pronoun emotional sentence database is valuable for various research areas, including linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, clinical rehabilitation, and computer science. The Chinese subject personal pronouns auditory emotional speech database is at open science framework