Decoding emotional messages: Influence of ethnicity, sex, message type, and channel.

Studied whether sex of sender and receiver, ethnic group of sender, positivity of affect, and communication channel would influence decoding of emotional messages. 34 male and 47 female Anglo-Australian Ss viewed videotapes of male or female Australian, British, or Italian speakers, who each presented 18 content-ambiguous messages with positive, negative, or neutral affect. Ss guessed the intended affect in each message. Analyses revealed that female encoders were better decoded than male encoders for positive and negative messages on all channels, but female decoders were more accurate than males only in the audiovisual (picture and sound) condition. Positive messages were decoded least accurately, especially when the speakers were Australian men. Although Italian men in the audiovisual condition were decoded worse than other men on neutral and negative messages, in the visual (picture only) condition, Italian men were decoded as well as other men. Italian women were decoded as accurately as other women for positive and neutral messages in both the audiovisual and visual conditions. In the audio (sound only) condition, Italian speakers of both sexes were decoded less accurately than other speakers of their sex. It is suggested that Italian accents were a distractor of decoding and that Anglo-Australian Ss paid less attention because of more negative attitudes toward male Southern European immigrants. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)