Bone et al. recently proposed an unsupervised signal-derived vocal arousal score (VC-AS) based on fusion of three intuitive acoustic features, i.e., pitch, intensity, and HF500, and have shown the effectiveness of quantifying humans perceptual rat-ings of arousal robustly across multiple corpora. Due to the readily-applicable nature of the system, this objective quantifi-cation scheme could foresee-ably be used in multiple fields of behavioral science as an objective measure of affect. In this work, we investigate in detail the relationship of this signal-derived measure to both intended arousal expression (i.e., pro-duction aspect) and perceived arousal rating (i.e., perception as-pect). On the perception side, our results in three databases (EMA, VAM, and IEMOCAP) indicate that VC-AS agrees with mean perception at least as well as an average individ-ual rater does. Regarding production, we demonstrate that in-tended arousal correlates more with VC-AS than mean percep-tion (EMA and IEMOCAP). We also show that VC-AS corre-lates more with intended arousal than perceived arousal (EMA); this finding is quite surprising given that the framework is sup-ported by extensive affective perception studies, although there is physiological motivation as well. Implication for utilizing VC-AS for novel scientific study in engineering (e.g., to miti-gate subjectivity) is further discussed. Index Terms: vocal arousal rating, affective perception, affec-tive production