Abstract
On hearing a novel voice, listeners readily form personality impressions of that speaker. Accurate or not, these impressions are known to affect subsequent interactions; yet the underlying psychological and acoustical bases remain poorly understood. Furthermore, hitherto studies have focussed on extended speech as opposed to analysing the instantaneous impressions we obtain from first experience. In this paper, through a mass online rating experiment, 320 participants rated 64 sub-second vocal utterances of the word ‘hello’ on one of 10 personality traits. We show that: (1) personality judgements of brief utterances from unfamiliar speakers are consistent across listeners; (2) a two-dimensional ‘social voice space’ with axes mapping Valence (Trust, Likeability) and Dominance, each driven by differing combinations of vocal acoustics, adequately summarises ratings in both male and female voices; and (3) a positive combination of Valence and Dominance results in increased perceived male vocal Attractiveness, whereas perceived female vocal Attractiveness is largely controlled by increasing Valence. Results are discussed in relation to the rapid evaluation of personality and, in turn, the intent of others, as being driven by survival mechanisms via approach or avoidance behaviours. These findings provide empirical bases for predicting personality impressions from acoustical analyses of short utterances and for generating desired personality impressions in artificial voices.
Highlights
Voices are saturated with cues to a person’s age, gender, and affective state [1], with information being extractable whether listening to sentences [2], or sub-second vocal bursts [3,4]
An original scale is proposed as a suitable summary if it correlates strongly with one principal components (PCs) and weakly with the other
A three dimensional solution to this Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and analysis based on gender of rater, is shown in the Supplementary Information (File S1; see Table S1 for 3D PCA, and Table S2, Table S3 & Table S4 for analysis by rater gender)
Summary
Voices are saturated with cues to a person’s age, gender, and affective state [1], with information being extractable whether listening to sentences [2], or sub-second vocal bursts [3,4]. Given that many judgements are based on static images or short interactions, these decisions are largely made without much knowledge of the person in question – often termed ‘zero acquaintance’ [23,24,25,26,27]. Despite their equal relevance to our daily lives, the rapid attribution of personality traits to novel speakers is poorly understood. The key traits for deriving first impressions of people from short vocalizations, and the vocal acoustics governing these traits, remain to be established
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