This work explores the power of visual and vocal channels, in conveying emotional cues exploiting realistic, dynamic and mutually related emotional vocal and facial stimuli, and aims to report on a cross cultural comparison on how people from different Western Countries perceive emotional dynamic stimuli.

The authors attempt to give an answer to the following questions evaluating the subjective perception of emotional states in the single (either visual or auditory channel) and the combined channels:

• In a body-to-body interaction, the addressee exploits both the verbal and non-verbal communication modes to infer the speaker’s emotional state. Is such an informational content redundant?
  
• Is the amount of information conveyed by each communication mode the same or is it different?
  
• How much information about the speaker’s emotional state is conveyed by each mode and is there a preferential communication mode for a given emotional state? -To what extent the cultural specificity affect the decoding of the emotional information?

The results are interpreted in terms of cognitive load, language expertise and stimulus dynamics.

This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the field of Human Computer Interaction, Affective Computing, Psychology, Social Sciences .