[Source: Medical News Today]

A team of researchers headed by the Erfurt-based psychologist Prof. Ralf Rummer and the Cologne-based phoneticist Prof. Martine Grice has carried out some ground-breaking experiments to uncover the links between language and emotions. They were able to demonstrate that the articulation of vowels systematically influences our feelings and vice versa.

The research project looked at the question of whether and to what extent the meaning of words is linked to their sound. The specific focus of the project was on two special cases; the sound of the long ‘i’ vowel (/i:/) and that of the long, closed ‘o’ vowel (/o:/). Rummer and Grice were particularly interested in finding out whether these vowels tend to occur in words that are positively or negatively charged in terms of emotional impact. For this purpose, they carried out two fundamental experiments, the results of which have now been published inEmotion, the journal of the American Psychological Association.

In the first experiment, the researchers exposed test subjects to film clips designed to put them in a positive or a negative mood and then asked them to make up ten artificial words themselves and to speak these out loud. They found that the artificial words contained significantly more ‘/i:/’s than ‘/o:/’s when the test subjects were in a positive mood. When in a negative mood, however, the test subjects formulated more ‘words’ with ‘/o:/’s.

Read the Rest of this Article on Medical News Today