How do you say 'hello'? Personality impressions from brief novel voices

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.

Figure 1. Principal Component Analysis solutions and main correlates of the Social Voice Space.

A) The two dimensional solution of the Principal Component Analysis for male (left) and female (right) voices (black dots). Labels equate to: Agg – Aggressiveness; Att – Attractiveness; Com – Competence; Conf – Confidence; Dom – Dominance; Lik – Likeability; Tru – Trustworthiness; War – Warmth. B) Correlation plots between the ratings of trustworthiness (Tru - top row), dominance (Dom - bottom row), and the first (PC1) and second (PC2) principal components for male (left) and female (voices). Blue ‘+’ represent individual voices. Trustworthiness was chosen arbitrarily over Likeability due to the strong correlation between these two traits.