title: 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.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, College of Science and Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Phil
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: McAleer
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Todorov
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, College of Science and Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom; Voice Neurocognition Laboratory, Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom; Département de Psychologie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Quebec, Canada; Institut des Neurosciences de La Timone, Université Aix-Marseille, Marseille, France.
authors.forename: Pascal
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Belin
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics; D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D010551:Personality; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D012737:Sex Factors; D013060:Speech; D014796:Visual Perception; D014831:Voice