Personality based on affective prosody: implications for speech therapy

Abstract

Affective prosody refers to the vocal quality of speech. In past research, it has been shown that patients with Parkinson’s disease have difficulty producing affective prosody in their speech, and subsequently, seen as passive and less intelligent by other people. The purpose of this study is to identify relevant sets of acoustic parameters, personality traits, and emotion types that would affect an individual’s attribution of personality towards other people. One hundred Chinese normal participants were asked to rate the personality of both male and female speakers after hearing a set of digital voice recordings (in Cantonese) developed in this study, as well as to indicate their willingness to help and whether they like each person (the speaker). Furthermore, the personality of each participant and speaker was also assessed using the short form of NEO–FFI (Chinese version). Each voice recording was manipulated in terms of Ekman & Friesen’s 6 universal emotions, and whether the recording was based on either a short sentence or just a single character. People’s personality attribution was affected by the difference between their own personality and that of the speaker, the emotional tone and linguistic composition of voice recordings, and the gender of both the speaker and the rater. The implications of these results are discussed in light of current speech therapy for patients with Parkinson’s disease and right-hemisphere brain damage.