Female Speakers Benefit More Than Male Speakers From Prosodic Charisma Training—A Before-After Analysis of 12-Weeks and 4-h Courses

Abstract

Perceived charisma is an important success factor in professional life. However, women are worse than men in conveying physical charisma signals while at the same time having to perform better than men in order to be perceived equally charismatic. Speech prosody probably contains the most influential charisma signals. We have developed a system called "Pascal" that analyzes and assesses on objective acoustic grounds how well-speakers employ their prosodic charisma parameters. Pascal is used for charismatic-speech training in 12-weeks and 4-h courses on entrepreneurship and leadership. Comparing the prosodic-charisma scores for a total of 72 participants at the beginning and end of these two course types showed that female speakers start with significantly lower prosodic-charisma scores than male speakers. However, at the end of the 4-h course, female speakers can catch up with their male counterparts in terms of prosodic charisma. At the end of the 12-weeks courses, male speakers keep their lead, but female speakers are able to significantly reduce the prosodic charisma gap to male speakers. Since leadership and entrepreneurship are still male-dominated domains, our results can be seen as an encouragement for women to attend prosodic charisma training. Furthermore, these courses require a gender-specific design as we found men to improve mainly in F0 parameters and women in duration and phonation parameters.

A Preliminary Study of Charismatic Speech on YouTube: Correlating Prosodic Variation with Counts of Subscribers, Views and Likes

“…In order to expand on the first, tentative results presented in this study, future research in this project will look into different measures and methods, and analyze longer excerpts and more features. Furthermore, research should look into possible thresholds above and below which certain parameters are no longer advantageous for the charismatic effect of a speaker, a research direction that has been started by [11]. Future studies should also analyze more speakers, and compare speakers of different success levels on YouTube.…”

“…According to [8, p. 294], charisma as a "concept is typically illdefined by using exemplars or by defining it by its outcomes". While it was (and still sometimes is) defined as an extraordinary, supernatural quality, following Max Weber (see [9] for an overview), charisma is today characterized as a trainable and gradual skill [10,11] that is based on shared values and emotions. The "influencing process is not one of authority but one of voluntary following" (as is the case for YouTube Creators and their communities) and an "individual can be charismatic without having any influence whatsoever" [8, p. 304].…”

“…Furthermore, it is reasonable in view of [17] to assume that loudness variability is, like pitch range, positively correlated with speaker charisma across a wide range of languages, including West Germanic lan-guages. However, the upper limits of this correlation ("overdose thresholds" in [11]) are likely language-specific. For example, British English speakers are said to make use of a relatively large fundamental frequency (f0) range, which in turn can be perceived as "over-excited" or "aggressive", at least by German listeners [18].…”

Towards the Prosody of Persuasion in Competitive Negotiation. The Relationship Between f0 and Negotiation Success in Same Sex Sales Tasks

“…Since elevated registers correspond to sounding livelier, more engaged, convincing, and competent in public speaking [3,24], this could be regarded as a general property of persuasiveness. The differences in magnitude found by speaker sex are also expectable since the register of average female speakers is already close to the charismatic optimum while male speakers usually have to raise their register by a larger amount [33,48].…”

“…Furthermore, a key contributor to successful competitive negotiation is dominance and assertiveness [15]. While certainty is also an important feature of charisma, the concept of charisma is commonly defined through persuasion without dominance and authority [29,32,33]. Accordingly, we expect manifestations of dominance to assume a much larger role in competitive negotiations.…”