Article published In:
Interaction StudiesVol. 17:1 (2016) ► pp.77–97
Voice features of telephone operators predict auditory preferences of consumers
What makes a human voice agreeable is a matter of scientific discussion. Whereas prosody was shown to play a role regarding “male-female” attraction, the impact of frequency modulations in “non-sexual”, notably commercial, contexts has attracted little attention. Another point unaddressed in the literature is auditory sensitivity to short-term frequency modulations as current studies focus more on sentence. Thirty French female operators were recorded over the phone. All “bonjour” greeting words were classified in terms of frequency modulation linearity and orientation at the syllable and word levels. Then, the different voices were played back to students and seniors who had to rate each voice according to their degree of agreeableness. Listeners preferred non-monotonous voices. Differences between age-classes were greater than between sex-classes. Results suggest that short-term frequency changes are important for auditory evaluation of voice agreeableness. This study opens new research perspectives concerning the importance of prosody during consumer-seller interactions.
Keywords: acoustic structure, human, phone interaction, prosody, voice perception
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Methods
- 2.1Participants
- 2.2Protocol
- 2.2.1Voice recording of telephone operators
- 2.2.2Playback to participants and evaluation of the agreeableness of the voices
- 2.2.3Acoustic analyses
- 2.2.4Data crossing and statistical analyses
- 3.Results
- 3.1Analyses at the syllable level
- 3.2Analyses at the word level
- 4.Discussion
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgments
-
References
References
Alpert, Murray, Pouget, Enrique R, and Silva, Raul R
2001 Reflections of depression in acoustic measures of the patients speech. Journal of Affective Disorders, 661, 59–69. 
Bach, DR, Buxtorf, K, Grandjean, D, and Strik, WK
2009 The influence of emotion clarity on emotional prosody identification in paranoid schizophrenia. Psychological Medecine, 391, 927–938.
Benkí, José, Broome, Jessica, Conrad, Frederick, Groves, Robert, and Kreuter, Frauke
2011 Effects of speech rate, pitch, and pausing on survey participation decisions. Proc. Section on Survey Research Methods, American Statistical Association.
Besson, Mireille, Magne, Cyrille, and Schon, Daniele
2002 Emotional prosody: sex differences in sensitivity to speech melody. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 61, 405–407.
Brown, Bruce L, Strong, William J, and Rencher, Alvin C
1973 Perceptions of personality from speech: effects of manipulations of acoustical parameters. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 541, 29–35.
1974 Fifty four voices from two: the effects of simultaneous manipulations of rate, mean fundamental frequency, and variance of fundamental frequency on ratings of personality from speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 551, 313–318.
1975 Acoustic determinants of perceptions of personality from speech. International Journal of Sociology of Language, 61, 11–32.
Bruckert, Laetitia, Bestmeyer, Patricia, Latinus, Marianne, Rouger, Julien, Charest, Ian, Rousselet, Guillaume, A., Kawahara Hideki, and Belin, Pascal
2010 Vocal attractiveness increases by averaging. Current Biology, 20.2, 116–120.
Bruckert, Laetitia, Lienard, Jean-Sylvain, Lacroix, André, Kreutzer, Michel, and Leboucher, Gérard
2006 Women use voice parameters to assess men's characteristics. Proc. Royal Society: Biology Sciences, 2731, 83–89.
Chen, Xuhai, Yang, Yufang
2012 When brain differentiates happy from neutral in prosody? 6th Int. Conference on Speech Prosody.
Cicchetti, Domenic V., and Heavens, Robert
1981 A computer program for determining the significance of the difference between pairs of independently derived values of kappa or weighted kappa. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 41.1, 189–193.
Collins, Sarah A
2000 Men’s voices and women’s choices. Animal Behaviour, 601, 773–780.
Collins, Sarah A, and Missing, Caroline
2003 Vocal and visual attractiveness are related in women. Animal Behaviour, 61, 997–1004.
Datta, S, and Sturtivant, C
2002 Dolphin whistle classification for determining group identities. Signal processing, 821, 251–258.
Dillma, Dillman A, Phelps, Glen, Tortora, Robert, Swift, Karen, Kohrell, Julie, Berck, Jodi, and Messer, Benjamin L
2009 Response rate and measurement differences in mixed-mode surveys using mail, telephone, interactive voice response (IVR) and the internet. Social Science Research, 381, 1–18.
Fecteau, Shirley, Armony, Jorge L, Joanette, Yves, and Belin, Pascal
2005 Judgment of emotional nonlinguistic vocalizations: age-related differences. Applied Neuropsychology, 121, 40–48.
Feinberg, David R, Jones, Benedict C, Little, Anthony C, and Burt DM
2005 Manipulations of fundamental and formant frequencies influence the attractiveness of human male voices. Animal Behaviour, 691, 561–568.
Feinberg, David R, Jones, Benedict C, Smith, Law MJ, Moore, FR, DeBruine, Lisa M, Cornwell, RE, Hillier, SG, and Perrett, DI
2006 Menstrual cycle, trait estrogen level, and masculinity preferences in the human voice. Hormones and Behavior, 491, 215–222.
Folstein, Marshal F, Folstein, Susan E, and McHugh, Paul R
1975 Mini-mental State. A practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 121, 189–198.
Hausberger, Martine
1997 Social influences on song acquisition and sharing in the European starling (Sturnus vulgaris). In Social influences on vocal learning (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), pp. 128–156.
Imaizumi, Satoshi, Homma, Midori, Ozawa, Yoshiaki, Maruishi, Masahura, and Muranaka, Hiroyuki
2004 Gender differences in the functional organization of the brain for emotional prosody processing. Int. Conference on Speech Prosody, pp. 23–26.
Johnson, Jeff. W.
1996 Linking employee perceptions of service climate to customer satisfaction. Personnel psychology, 49(4), 831–851.
Jones, Benedict C, Feinberg, David R, DeBruine, Lisa M, Little, Anthony C, and Vukovic, Jovana
2008 Integrating cues of social interest and voice pitch in men’s preferences for women’s voices. Biology Letters, 41, 192–194.
2010 A domain-specific opposite-sex bias in human preferences for manipulated voice pitch. Animal Behaviour, 791, 57–62.
Klofstad, Casey, Anderson, Rindy, and Peters, Susan
2012 Sounds like a winner: voice pitch influences perception of leadership capacity. Proc. Royal Society, 2791, 2698–2704.
Kokkinos, Constantinos. M
2007 Job stressors, personality and burnout in primary school teachers. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 77(1), 229–243.
Kurlowicz, Lenore., & Wallace, Meredith
1999 The mini-mental state examination (MMSE). Journal of gerontological nursing, 25(5), 8–9.
Latinus, Marianne, and Belin, Pascal
2011 Human voice perception. Current Biology, 211, 143–145.
Lemasson, Alban, and Hausberger, Martine
2011 Acoustic variability and social significance of calls in female Campbell’s monkeys (Cercopi-thecus campbelli campbelli). Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1291, 3341–3352.
Little, Anthony C, Saxton, Tamsin K, Roberts, Craig S, Jones, Benedict C, Debruine, Lisa M, Vukovic, Jovana, Perrett, David I, Feinberg, David R, and Chenore, Todd
2010 Women’s preferences for masculinity in male faces are highest during reproductive age range and lower around puberty and post-menopause. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 351, 912–920.
McAleer, Phil Alexander Todorov, and Pascal Belin
2014 How do you say ‘Hello’? Personality impressions from brief novel voices. PloS one, 9.3, e90779.
McCowan, Brenda, and Reiss, Diana
1997 Vocal learning in captive bottlenose dolphins: a comparison with humans and nonhuman animals. Social influence and vocal development, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), pp. 178–207.
Mehrabian, Albert, and Ferris, Susan R
1967 Inference of attitudes from nonverbal communication in two channels. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 311, 248–252.
Mill, Aire, Alink, Jüri, Realo, Anu, and Valk, Raivo
2009 Age-related differences in emotion recognition ability: across-sectional study. Emotion, 91, 619–630.
Mitchell, Rachel LC
2007 Age-related decline in the ability to decode emotional prosody: primary or secondary phenomenon? Cognition and Emotion, 71, 1435–1454.
Montepare, Joann M, and Zebrowitz-McArthur, Leslie
1987 Perceptions of adults with childlike voices in two cultures. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 231, 331–349.
Nagy, Mark. S
2002 Using a single-item approach to measure facet job satisfaction. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 75(1), 77–86.
Oksenberg, Lois, Coleman, Lerita, and Cannell, Charles F
1986 Interviewer voices and refusal rates in telephone surveys. Public Opinion Quarterly, 501, 97–111.
Paulmann, Silke, Schmidt, Patricia, Pell, Marc D, and Kotz, Sonja A
2008 Rapid processing of emotional and voice information as evidenced by ERPs. 4th Int. Conference Speech Prosody, 205–209.
Peng, Ying, Zebrowitz, Leslie A, and Lee, Hoon Koo
1993 The impact of cultural background and cross-cultural experience on impressions of American and Korean male speakers. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 241, 203–220.
Peron, Julie, El Tamer, Sarah, Grandjean, Didier, Leray, Emmanuelle, Travers, David, Drapier Dominique, Verin, Marc, and Millet, Bruno
2011 Major depressive disorder skews the recognition of emotional prosody. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, 351, 987–996.
Puts, David A
2005 Menstrual phase and mating context affect women’s preferences for male voice pitch. Evolution and Human Behavior, 261, 388–397.
Re, Daniel E, O’Connor, Jillian JM, Bennett, Patrick J, and Feinberg, David R
2012 Preferences for very low and very high voice pitch in humans. PLoS ONE, 71, e32719.
Richard, Jean-Pierre
1991 Sound analysis and synthesis using an amiga micro-computer. Bioacoustics, 31, 45–60.
Rymarczyk, Krystyna, and Grabowska, Anna
2007 Sex differences in brain control of prosody. Neuropsychologia, 451, 921–930.
Saxton, Tamsin K, DeBruine, Lisa M, Jones, Benedict C, Little, Anthony C, and Roberts, Craig S
2009 Face and voice attractiveness judgments change during adolescence. Evolution and Human Behavior, 301, 398–408.
Scherer, Klaus R
1972 Judging personality from voice: A cross-cultural approach to an old issue in inter-personal perception. Journal of Personality, 401, 191–210.
1978 Personality inference from voice quality: the loud voice of extroversion. European Journal of Social Psychology, 81, 467–487.
Simmons, Leigh W, Peters, Marianne, and Rhodes, Gillian
2011 Low pitched voices are perceived as masculine and attractive but do they predict semen quality in men? PLoS One, 61, e29271.
Smith, Bruce L, Brown, Bruce L, Strong, William J, and Rencher, Alvin C
1975 Effects of speech rate on personality perceptions. Language and Speech, 181, 145–152.
Szymaszek, A, Szelag, E and Sliwowska, M
2006 Auditory perception of temporal order in humans: the effect of age, gender, listener practice and stimulus presentation mode. Neuroscience Letters, 4031, 190–194.
Trout, Andrew, Magnusson, Roy, A., and Hedges, Jerris, R
2000 Patient satisfaction investigations and the emergency department: what does the literature say? Academic emergency medicine, 7(6), 695–709.
Vukovic, Jovana, Feinberg, David R, Jones, Benedict C, DeBruine, Lisa M, Welling, LLM, Little, Anthony C, and Smith, FG
2008 Self-rated attractiveness predicts individual differences in women’s preferences for masculine men’s voices. Personality and Individual Differences, 451, 451–456.
Weirich, Melanie
2008 Vocal stereotypes. Proc. of International Symposium on Cumputer Architecture, pp. 25–27.
Yesavage, Jerome A, Brink, TL, Rose, Terence L, Lum, Owen, Huang, Virginia, Adey, Michael, and Leirer, Von Otto
1983 Development and validation of a geriatric depression screening scale: a preliminary report. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 71, 37–49.
Zetterholm, Elisabeth
1998 Prosody and voice quality in the expression of emotions. Proc. of the Seventh Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, pp. 109–113.
Zuckerman, Miron, and Miyake, Kunitate
1993 The attractive voice: what makes it so? Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 171, 119–130.