The sound of trustworthiness: Acoustic-based modulation of perceived voice personality

Belin, Pascal; Boehme, Bibi; McAleer, Phil

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0185651

Cited by 56 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…multimodal learning: Despite our financial domain, our approach is relevant to multimodal learning using text and audio. Recent studies on speech communication have shown that a speaker's acoustic features, such as voice pitch, amplitude, and intensity, are highly correlated with the speaker's emotion (Bachorowski, 1999), deception or trustworthiness (Sporer and Schwandt, 2006;Belin et al, 2017), anxiety (Laukka et al, 2008) and confidence or doubt (Jiang and Pell, 2017).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

What You Say and How You Say It Matters: Predicting Stock Volatility Using Verbal and Vocal Cues

Qin¹,

Yang²

2019

Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Predicting financial risk is an essential task in financial market. Prior research has shown that textual information in a firm's financial statement can be used to predict its stock's risk level. Nowadays, firm CEOs communicate information not only verbally through press releases and financial reports, but also nonverbally through investor meetings and earnings conference calls. There are anecdotal evidences that CEO's vocal features, such as emotions and voice tones, can reveal the firm's performance. However, how vocal features can be used to predict risk levels, and to what extent, is still unknown. To fill the gap, we obtain earnings call audio recordings and textual transcripts for S&P 500 companies in recent years. We propose a multimodal deep regression model (MDRM) that jointly model CEO's verbal (from text) and vocal (from audio) information in a conference call. Empirical results show that our model that jointly considers verbal and vocal features achieves significant and substantial prediction error reduction. We also discuss several interesting findings and the implications to financial markets. The processed earnings conference calls data (text and audio) are released for readers who are interested in reproducing the results or designing trading strategy.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

What You Say and How You Say It Matters: Predicting Stock Volatility Using Verbal and Vocal Cues

Qin¹,

Yang²

2019

Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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“…Therefore, the evidence for the influence of male voice pitch on perceptions of trustworthiness is mixed. In addition, recent work has indicated the influence of within‐word pitch contours on perceptions of trustworthiness (Belin, Boehme, & McAleer, ). Although the influence of speech intonation is certainly of value to social perception research, the present studies focus on trait (average) voice pitch, rather than on pitch contour.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High voice pitch mitigates the aversiveness of antisocial cues in men's speech

O'Connor

Barclay

2018

British J of Psychology

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Speech contains both explicit social information in semantic content and implicit cues to social behaviour and mate quality in voice pitch. Voice pitch has been demonstrated to have pervasive effects on social perceptions, but few studies have examined these perceptions in the context of meaningful speech. Here, we examined whether male voice pitch interacted with socially relevant cues in speech to influence listeners' perceptions of trustworthiness and attractiveness. We artificially manipulated men's voices to be higher and lower in pitch when speaking words that were either prosocial or antisocial in nature. In Study 1, we found that listeners perceived lower-pitched voices as more trustworthy and attractive in the context of prosocial words than in the context of antisocial words. In Study 2, we found evidence that suggests this effect was driven by stronger preferences for higher-pitched voices in the context of antisocial cues, as voice pitch preferences were not significantly different in the context of prosocial cues. These findings suggest that higher male voice pitch may ameliorate the negative effects of antisocial speech content and that listeners may be particularly avoidant of those who express multiple cues to antisociality across modalities.

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“…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%

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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The sound of trustworthiness: Acoustic-based modulation of perceived voice personality

Cited by 56 publications

References 20 publications

What You Say and How You Say It Matters: Predicting Stock Volatility Using Verbal and Vocal Cues

What You Say and How You Say It Matters: Predicting Stock Volatility Using Verbal and Vocal Cues

High voice pitch mitigates the aversiveness of antisocial cues in men's speech

Does he sound cooperative? Acoustic correlates of cooperativeness

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