Vocal sounds such as a sigh, a scream, or laughter are considered verbal communication behaviors.

The Online Audio Map for the Study

Listening to Your Sighsnon-verbal dimensions of empathic connection​A recent study in psychology, profiled by the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley,shows that knowing other people, and empathizing with them, can include listeningto their non-linguistic forms of vocalization, by which they express 24 emotions.​ (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Hear the emotions on the online audio map

​The Study: Cowen, Alan & Elfenbein, Hillary & Laukka, Petri & Keltner, Dacher. (2018). Mapping 24 Emotions Conveyed by Brief Human Vocalization. American Psychologist. 10.1037/amp0000399. 

​Five take-home points from the Study

We communicate with one another through wordless vocalizations or "vocal bursts," which include sighs, gasps, screams and sounds such as woohoo, ahh, oops, and huh? The vocal bursts are typically deciphered in a matter of seconds. The bursts cannot easily be faked and often reveal our immediate feelings, states, and traits more than the words we use. ​At least 24 emotions are revealed through these bursts: adoration, amusement, anger, awe, confusion, contempt, contentment, desire, disappointment, disgust, distress, ecstasy, elation, embarrassment, fear, interest, pain, realization, relief, sadness, surprise (positive), surprise (negative), sympathy, and triumph. The vocal bursts often combine these emotions in graded intensities: e.g. embarassment with a degree of surprise, interest with a degree of disgust.​

Process philosophers and theologians believe that we live in an inter-subjective universe.  The world around us is not a mere collection of objects but rather (in the words of Thomas Berry) a communion of subjects.  Human beings have subjectivity, but plants and animals, hills and rivers, trees and stars, also have something like subjectivity within them.  Their inner aliveness consists of energy, which itself is a form of emotion.  Thus we live in an inter-emotional universe. 

​One key to a promising future is that we humans recognize and care for the subjectivity of others, knowing that they have an emotional side deserving respect and care.  This requires a certain degree of emotional intelligence.  Emotional intelligence, along with embodied wisdom, is what process philosophers and theologians mean by 'spirituality.'  See Process Spirituality: A Very Short Introduction.  One spiritual practice, and an important one, is what we might call Listening to Your Sighs.  Here "sighs" is a metaphor for the many emotions that we humans express to one another in non-verbal ways.

A recent study at the University of California, Berkeley, helps us understand how much we communicate with one another through non-linguistic or non-verbal utterances such as woohoo, ahh, and oops, along with sighs gasps, screams, and moans. [1] They are called vocal bursts.  According to the study, we communicate 24 emotions through these bursts.  You can read an article on the study published by the Berkeley Center for the Common Good by clicking here. and you can read the study itself, published in the American psychologist, by clicking​ here.  Most interesting, click on the online audio map and hear the sounds yourself:

Laughter and the Many Forms of Sighs

Excerpts from the article in Berkeley's Greater Good Magazineby Yasmin Aswar (Media Relations Representative at UC Berkeley)

"Ooh, surprise! Those spontaneous sounds we make to express everything from elation (woohoo) to embarrassment (oops) say a lot more about what we’re feeling than previously understood, according to new UC Berkeley research. ​ Proving that a sigh is not just a sigh, scientists conducted a statistical analysis of listener responses to more than 2,000 nonverbal exclamations known as “vocal bursts” and found they convey at least 24 kinds of emotion. Previous studies of vocal bursts set the number of recognizable emotions closer to 13. The results, recently published online in the American Psychologist journal, are demonstrated in vivid sound and color on the first-ever interactive audio map of nonverbal vocal communication. ​ “This study is the most extensive demonstration of our rich emotional vocal repertoire, involving brief signals of upwards of two dozen emotions as intriguing as awe, adoration, interest, sympathy, and embarrassment,” said study senior author Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, which helped support the research." BY YASMIN ANWAR | APRIL 18, 2019, Greater Good Magazine: Science-Based Insights for a Meaningful Life

​amusement, anger, awe, confusion, contempt, contentment, desire, disappointment, disgust, distress, ecstasy, elation, embarrassment, fear, interest, pain, realization, relief, sadness, surprise (positive), surprise (negative), sympathy, and triumph. “Our findings show that the voice is a much more powerful tool for expressing emotion than previously assumed,” said study lead author Alan Cowen, a Ph.D. student in psychology at UC Berkeley. ...“These results show that emotional expressions color our social interactions with spirited declarations of our inner feelings that are difficult to fake, and that our friends, coworkers, and loved ones rely on to decipher our true commitments,” Cowen said. Wheel of Spirituality: spirituality and practice.com

Which of the following is an example of a nonverbal behavior?

What is commonly referred to as body language is actually the observation of or the way gestures and body movements send nonverbal messages?

When a persons verbal message contradicts her or his nonverbal message we usually believe?

Is the process of intentionally or unintentionally signaling meaning through behavior rather than words?