Speech Rate, Intonation, and Pitch: Investigating the Bias and Cue Effects of Vocal Confidence on Persuasion

Abstract

Three experiments were designed to investigate the effects and psychological mechanisms of three vocal qualities on persuasion. Experiment 1 ( N = 394) employed a 2 (elaboration: high vs. low) × 2 (vocal speed: fast vs. slow) × 2 (vocal intonation: falling vs. rising) between-participants factorial design. As predicted, vocal speed and vocal intonation influenced global perceptions of speaker confidence. Under high-elaboration, vocal confidence biased thought-favorability, which influenced attitudes. Under low-elaboration, vocal confidence directly influenced attitudes as a peripheral cue. Experiments 2 ( N = 412) and 3 ( N = 397) conceptually replicated the bias and cue effects in Experiment 1, using a 2 (elaboration: high vs. low) × 2 (vocal pitch: raised vs. lowered) between-participants factorial design. Vocal pitch influenced perceptions of speaker confidence as predicted. These studies demonstrate that changes in three vocal properties influence global perceptions of speaker confidence, influencing attitudes via different mediating processes moderated by amount of thought. Evaluation of alternative mediators in Experiments 2 and 3 failed to support these alternatives to global perceptions of speaker confidence.

“Killing Ourselves Laughing” — Why We Laugh Anyway, Even When We Know We Shouldn’t

“…Taking a closer look at the acoustic effects and body movement we note that C.K. 's deft use of smiles and voice correspond to the findings of Apple et al (1979, 715-720) and Guyer et al (2019) concerning the communicative effects of smiles and voice modulation. Dressed in an ordinary black t-shirt and jeans, C.K.…”

Listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of a speaker are associated with a common prosodic signature

“…This procedure has three main advantages over the elicitation paradigm. First, it allows decorrelating perception from production by sampling agnostically from a large feature space rather than focusing on a smaller space sampled by experimenters 46 or actors 14 and thus constrained by their own perception. Second, it allows an unconstrained and unbiased test of the hypothesis that listeners' perception of the certainty and honesty of a speaker rely on a common prosodic signature at the perceptual level, by probing listeners' representations for the two attitudes separately before comparing them within the same frame of reference.…”

“…A last important aspect of the first study is that we relied on a two-alternative forced-choice procedure, which not only allows bypassing individual decisional biases (e.g., a truth-bias where observers tend to assume that speakers are honest 3,40 , or conversely, a lie-bias 2 ) but also assessing the specific contribution of prosody to social perceptions (the effects of word and speaker identity being discarded because stimuli of a given pair were similar for these aspects). This allows us to specifically uncover perceptual representations of certainty/honesty in a context-free and unbiased manner, contrary to absolute, continuous judgments (e.g., on a Likert scale) typically used in past studies 14,46 , that reflected a mixture of perceptual and decisional processes.…”

“…If this prosodic signature of unreliability stems from physiological reactions associated with cognitive effort, rather than from culturally learned conventions, we should expect that it should be perceived crosslinguistically 23,29 . Contrary to cross-cultural perception of vocal emotions, which has received a large amount of attention over the past decades 54 , past studies on prosodic signatures of certainty and honesty examined only one language and attitude at once 13,14,43,46 or compared the expression or perception of certainty or honesty across languages without actually testing whether these attitudes can be recognized cross-linguistically 43,55 . Only one study indirectly tested whether a composite attitude of doubt/incredulity (coarsely defined as a "feeling of being uncertain or of not believing something") can be perceived across languages in Japanese, French, and English speakers from speech prosody alone, by relying on an elicitation procedure involving real utterances recorded in the three languages separately by trained speakers 56 .…”

The Relationship Between Head Motion Synchronization and Empathy in Unidirectional Face-to-Face Communication

“…Clarifying the relationship between changes in physical indicators and degree of empathy would improve interpretation of the cognitive relationship between body motion synchronization and degree of empathy from a physical aspect. Because body motions give different impressions, depending on speed and generation timing ( Mehrabian and Williams, 1969 ; Miller et al, 1976 ), we specifically analyzed body motion using a set of physical indicators, including frequency and phase difference. We hypothesized that the phase and frequency relationships of body motion synchronization would change according to the degree of empathy during face-to-face communication.…”