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.