title: Measuring emotion in the voice during psychotherapy interventions: a pilot study.
abstract: The voice as a representation of the psychic world of patients in psychotherapeutic interventions has not been studied thoroughly. To explore speech prosody in relation to the emotional content of words, voices recorded during a semi-structured interview were analyzed. The subjects had been classified according to their childhood emotional experiences with caregivers and their different attachment representations. In this pilot study, voice quality as spectral parameters extracted from vowels of the key word "mother" (German: "Mutter") were analyzed. The amplitude of the second harmonic was large relative to the amplitude of the third harmonic for the vowel "u" in the secure group as compared to the preoccupied group. Such differences might be related to the subjects' emotional involvement during an interview eliciting reconstructed childhood memories.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Medicine, University of Chile, Santiago de Chile. mmoneta@med.uchile.cl
authors.forename: María E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Moneta
authors.forename: Mario
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Penna
authors.forename: Hugo
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Loyola
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Buchheim
authors.forename: Horst
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kächele
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007406:Interview, Psychological; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D010865:Pilot Projects; D011613:Psychotherapy / Q000379:methods*; D014833:Voice Quality / Q000502:physiology*