Expression of emotions in different cultures

We, Arjun and Ameya, are SRH students from India. Back home, we were told that the German culture is very different to ours, but to experience it first-hand is something else. 

In the beginning we were a bit scared. We were constantly watchful of how we spoke so that we do not come out as rude to others. The experience of the infamous “culture shock” lead to both of us wondering the same exact thing, ‘Is there a way to compare how different emotions are expressed by different cultures in a quantitative way?’. 

If successful, the results could have helped understanding the subtle intentions of the person in front of us better and thereby avoid any confusion. Fortunately, both of us decided to work with Prof. Dr. Alexander I. Iliev to pursue our research interests and a discussion about this topic in one our group meetings helped us to pursue this idea further. 

We then decided to join Prof Iliev’s research group and continued working on this and other similar topics that we try to publish under his guidance and supervision. Having worked with sound and machine learning for most of his career, our professor was the right person to guide us to explore this further. 

There, we started the journey of collecting, reading, and understanding prior work done in this field of study. Prof. Iliev is instrumental in our success as he is constantly guiding and helping us fill our gaps in the scientific area. After spending a fair amount of time and effort, we developed the necessary infrastructure to progress with our work. 

As an initial study, we decided to compare 3 different cultures using Digital Signal Processing (DSP) techniques and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We considered speech data spoken by actors in English, Italian and French where they expressed all the 6 basic emotions. 

We decided to limit our study to comparing and understanding the difference in the expression of 4 among these 6 emotions, them being anger, sadness, happiness and neutral, in order to decrease the complexity of the project. After much deliberation, our efforts yielded results and the work was accepted and will be published in the conference proceedings of DIPP Conference held by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences at the end of September 2020. 

It has been an amazing journey so far and we hope to work on many more interesting projects and diverse topics we discuss in the research group with Prof. Dr. Alexander Iliev.