The purpose of this article is to investigate observers' use of acoustic cues to arrive at judgments of the speaker's affective state and to address current methodological limitations. Ninety-nine female undergraduates rated the level of excitement, happiness, and anger of speech stimuli under three content-masking procedures: low-pass filtering, random splicing, and reiterant speech. Each procedure preserves some forms of acoustic information while disrupting or degrading others. As predicted, the content-masking procedures generated bias in observers' affective ratings. Results are discussed in terms of the efficacy of the content-masking procedures and implications for the study of acoustic cues to speaker affect.