Emotional prosody

Emotional prosody or affective prosody is the various non-verbal aspects of language that allow people to convey or understand emotion. It includes an individual's tone of voice in speech that is conveyed through changes in pitch, loudness, timbre, speech rate, and pauses. It can be isolated from semantic information, and interacts with verbal content (e.g. sarcasm).

Emotional prosody in speech is perceived or decoded slightly worse than facial expressions but accuracy varies with emotions. Anger and sadness are perceived most easily, followed by fear and happiness, with disgust being the most poorly perceived.