Angry, old, male – and trustworthy? How expressive and person voice characteristics shape listener trust

Schirmer, Annett; Feng, Yenju; Sen, Antarika; Penney, Trevor B.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0210555

Cited by 12 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…In fact, both acoustic features influence perception of how trustworthy a speaker is. For example, lower-pitched male voices and voices with high pitch variations are perceived as more trustworthy in general (Belin et al, 2017;Oleszkiewicz et al, 2017;Schirmer et al, 2019;Tsantani et al, 2016) or when trust is linked to the political context (Klofstad et al, 2015(Klofstad et al, , 2012Tigue et al, 2012). It remains unknown, however, whether these acoustic features correlate with actual trustworthiness, and not only with perceived trustworthiness.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One study showed a weak association between testosterone and pitch variations (Puts et al, 2012), whereas some authors suggest that jitter and HNR are sensitive to hormonal influx because both relate to oscillations of the vocal folds, which are influenced by circulating androgens (Pisanski et al, 2016). Moreover, pitch variations, jitter, and HNR influence listeners' perceptions of cooperativeness or trustworthiness (Belin, Boehme, & McAleer, 2017;Knowles & Little, 2016;McAleer, Todorov, & Belin, 2014;Ponsot, Burred, Belin, & Aucouturier, 2018;Schirmer et al, 2019;Weirich, 2008). State-of-the-art vocal manipulations of pitch highlight the major influence that pitch variations have on perceptions of a speaker's social traits (Belin et al, 2017;Ponsot et al, 2018), such that voices with greater variations in pitch (i.e., more dynamic, less monotonic) are rated as more cooperative than voices with less variations (Knowles & Little, 2016).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Does he sound cooperative? Acoustic correlates of cooperativeness

Tognetti

Durand

Barkat‐Defradas

et al. 2019

British J of Psychology

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The sound of the voice has several acoustic features that influence the perception of how cooperative the speaker is. It remains unknown, however, whether these acoustic features are associated with actual cooperative behaviour. This issue is crucial to disentangle whether inferences of traits from voices are based on stereotypes, or facilitate the detection of cooperative partners. The latter is likely due to the pleiotropic effect that testosterone has on both cooperative behaviours and acoustic features. In the present study, we quantified the cooperativeness of native French‐speaking men in a one‐shot public good game. We also measured mean fundamental frequency, pitch variations, roughness, and breathiness from spontaneous speech recordings of the same men and collected saliva samples to measure their testosterone levels. Our results showed that men with lower‐pitched voices and greater pitch variations were more cooperative. However, testosterone did not influence cooperative behaviours or acoustic features. Our finding provides the first evidence of the acoustic correlates of cooperative behaviour. When considered in combination with the literature on the detection of cooperativeness from faces, the results imply that assessment of cooperative behaviour would be improved by simultaneous consideration of visual and auditory cues.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Does he sound cooperative? Acoustic correlates of cooperativeness

Tognetti

Durand

Barkat‐Defradas

et al. 2019

British J of Psychology

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“…To date, only a couple of studies considered expressive and person characteristics in the context of vocal first impressions [10,41,42] and none, that we could identify, examined trustworthiness. Hence, we sought to address this issue and have done so in a previous publication of this data [43] that has since been retracted [44]. This original work was compromised by the fact that acoustic analyses of frequency and intensity related parameters were based on an entire utterance failing to exclude unvoiced elements such as voiceless consonants from processing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Angry, old, male – and trustworthy? How expressive and person voice characteristics shape listener trust

Schirmer

Chiu

et al. 2020

PLoS ONE

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This study examined how trustworthiness impressions depend on vocal expressive and person characteristics and how their dependence may be explained by acoustical profiles. Sentences spoken in a range of emotional and conversational expressions by 20 speakers differing in age and sex were presented to 80 age and sex matched listeners who rated speaker trustworthiness. Positive speaker valence but not arousal consistently predicted greater perceived trustworthiness. Additionally, voices from younger as compared with older and female as compared with male speakers were judged more trustworthy. Acoustic analysis highlighted several parameters as relevant for being perceived as trustworthy (i.e., accelerated tempo, low harmonic-to-noise ratio, more shimmer, low fundamental frequency, more jitter, large intensity range) and showed that effects partially overlapped with those for perceived speaker affect, age, but not sex. Specifically, a fast speech rate and a lower harmonic-to-noise ratio differentiated trustworthy from untrustworthy, positive from negative, and younger from older voices. Male and female voices differed in other ways. Together, these results show that a speaker's expressive as well as person characteristics shape trustworthiness impressions and that their effect likely results from a combination of lowlevel perceptual and higher-order conceptual processes.

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“…In recent years, the significance of voice in perceived trustworthiness has been investigated in many previous studies [14]- [18]. Many papers have also investigated the effect of individual vocal cues on trust at zero acquaintance.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In [18] it is investigated the effect of trustworthiness impressions on vocal expressive and person characteristics and how the relationship can be explained by acoustical profiles. In [18] it is indicated that positive speaker valence but not arousal, consistently predict greater perceived trustworthiness. Furthermore, female as compared with male speakers and younger voices compared with older were perceived as more trustworthy.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Sound of Trust: Towards Modelling Computational Trust using Voice-only Cues at Zero-Acquaintance

Hui¹,

Lutfi²,

Naim³

et al. 2020

Adv. sci. technol. eng. syst. j.

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Trust is essential in many interdependent human relationships. Trustworthiness is measured via the effectiveness of the relationships involving human perception. The decision to trust others is often made quickly (even at zero acquaintance). Previous research has shown the significance of voice in perceived trustworthiness. However, the listeners' characteristics were not considered. A system has yet to be produced that can quantitatively predict the degree of trustworthiness in a voice. This research aims to investigate the relationship between trustworthiness and different vocal features while considering the listener's physical characteristics, towards modelling a computational trust model. This study attempts to predict the degree of trustworthiness in voice by using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model. A set of 30 audio clips of white males were obtained, acoustically analyzed and then distributed to a large group of untrained Malaysian respondents who rated their degree of trust in the speakers of each audio clip on a scale of 0 to 10. The ANOVA test showed a statistically significant difference of trust ratings across different types and intensities of emotion, duration of audio clip, average fundamental frequencies, speech rates, articulation rates, average loudness, ethnicity of listener and ages of listener (p <.01). The findings conclude that Malaysians tend to trust white males who talk faster and longer, speak louder, have an f0 between 132.03Hz & 149.52Hz, and show a neutral emotion or rather stoic (arousal<.325). Results suggest that Indians are the most trusting Malaysian ethnic group, followed by Bumiputera from East Malaysia and then followed by Malays. Chinese are the least trusting Malaysian ethnic group. The data was fed into an ANN model to be evaluated, which yielded a perfect percentage accuracy (100%) in degree of trustworthiness 39.70% of the time. Given a threshold of two-point deviation, the ANN had a prediction accuracy of 76.86%.

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Angry, old, male – and trustworthy? How expressive and person voice characteristics shape listener trust

Cited by 12 publications

References 58 publications

Does he sound cooperative? Acoustic correlates of cooperativeness

Does he sound cooperative? Acoustic correlates of cooperativeness

Angry, old, male – and trustworthy? How expressive and person voice characteristics shape listener trust

The Sound of Trust: Towards Modelling Computational Trust using Voice-only Cues at Zero-Acquaintance

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