Sadness in speech: minor thirds?

In "Poem in the key of what" (10/9/2006), I blogged about a paper by Maartje Schreuder, Laura van Eerten and Dicky Gilbers, "Speaking in major and minor keys". Its abstract: In music the difference between sad and cheerful melodies is often indicated as a difference between a minor and a major key. In order to investigate whether the same difference can be found in language, we analyzed intonation contours in emotional speech. We made cluster analyses in order to find out which fundamental frequencies were most present in the contours. Furthermore, we analyzed the musical scores of sad and cheerful speech as well. In the pitch contours of all speakers we found intervals of three semitones in sad passages and intervals of four semitones in cheerful passages. We therefore conclude that emotional speech melody, just as musical melody, involves major and minor modalities. I expressed some skepticism: The idea behind this paper is that the pitch contours of speech naturally express the…