Predicting Personal Characteristics Based

on Perception of Voice

By: Hannah Chu, Alice Samaia, Greta Schatz, Cassie Stevens

Voice as external attribute that affects interpersonal behavior (i.e. persuasion and establishing relationship)

Telephone interview study→ Results demonstrated that features of voice significantly correlated with personal features

(Oguchi & Kikuchi, 2002)

Background

Analyze how people make assumptions about physical appearance and personality traits from certain voice characteristics

Hypothesesa. Subjects would be confident about their

accuracy in answering questions about physical appearance and personality traits based on voice characteristics

b. Subjects will be more likely to find the same sex voice more appealing.

Motivation/Hypotheses

Independent Variable:

ParticipantsTwo Female Voices

Two Male Voices

Dependent Variable:

Accuracy of SubjectsRating of Personality

Participants:

● 42 Students● 9 Male● 33 Female

Image: http://www.accuratect.com/images/masthead_participation.jpg

ProcedureQuestionnaires with physical and personality

characteristics were given to participants. Participants were asked to listen to four

voices, 2 female and 2 male.Participants answered multiple choice

questions for physical traits.Participants rated personality traits on a scale

of 1-6.Participants lastly rated how accurate they

believed they were for each voice.

Measures“Accuracy” was based on the amount of

correct answers for physical traits.“Confidence” was an average scaled to a 1:42

ratio in order for us to give a meaningful comparison to accuracy.

“Personality” was measured by averaging the ratings of the participants.

“Pitch” was determined by comparing the four voices and rating the highness or lowness of each voice relative to the other voices.

Image: http://www.clipartbest.com/cliparts/9i4/EdX/9i4EdX4iE.png

● Accuracy tended to be higher for relatively lower voices

●Confidence level didn’t change

100% of the subjects perceived voice four as being younger than the reality.

Voice four was considerably higher than voice two, which may account for the sizeable inaccuracies in interpretations.

Discussion on Non-Graphed Data

Personality Attributions“The personality assessments are made with a short version (10 items) of the Big Five Inventory (BFI), one of the most common personality assessment tools. The results show that traits attributed by human judges can be predicted with an accuracy ranging from 65% to 80%.”

(Mohammadi, Vinciarelli, & Mortillaro, 2010)

LimitationsAn unbalanced number of males to femalesSubjects did not always answer the entire survey

Instructions were sometimes ignoredFemale voices did not have a wide variation in pitch

Subjects sometimes did not put in the effort to circle individual numbers, circling entire columns

Subjects were influenced by each other

ConclusionSubjects were not as confident as anticipated

Unexpected patterns within the data, especially in the age and gender category were found

This indicates further studies can be done to investigate associations between physical characteristics and voice traits

Improvements and Further Studies

Same number of males to females in sample

Larger pitch range of voice recordingsNarrowed down goal (focus on one question)Focus on age attributions

Focus on gender differences

Voice pitch and its relation to attractiveness

Mohammadi, G., Vinciarelli, A., & Mortillaro, M. (2010). The Voice ofPersonality: Mapping Nonverbal Vocal Behavior into Trait

Attributions. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Social Signal Processing, 34, 17-20.

Oguchi, T., & Kikuchi, H. (2002). Voice and Interpersonal Attraction. Japanese Psychological Research, 39(1), 56-61.

References

Thank You!Any Questions?