#fame garin

Perception of Agreeableness Factor of Personality and Conveyed Emotion Based on Pitch of Human Voice

You know that awkward first meeting wherein all you say are one-word responses or those generic opening sentences?

( Hi. What's your course? Ahhh Psych. Soooo what Psych classes are you taking this sem? ahhh. *silence*)

Well we're like usually because we don't have the other person's context at hand. We don't know what interests them, what annoys them and such and such. You spend an embarrassing amount of time dancing around each other and sitting in silence until you spend too much awkward moments together.

That's all well and good because that's just the getting-to-know-you process of it all but in this fast-paced world of ours it's kinda a hassle, time is of the essence and efficiency is loss by every single minute we hesitate. Plus more and more we get by with just communicating through our mobile phones or landline phones. You're left with no other cues but the voice of the other person. So what do you do?

Good thing is that you can actually infer some information from the voice alone. According to Krauss (1997) information like age, gender, region of origin and social class are contained in nonverbal communication, which included the speaker's voice. The speaker's voice also reflects his/her internal state.

So with the knowledge (and the accumulation of various researches done by psychologists) that it can be done, that you can actually tell a person's characteristics even if the only cue you have is his or her voice, the group decided to tackle on the task of determining whether you can detect a person's emotion and his/her personality based on only one factor: pitch.

We chose pitch because out of the all the prosodic factors it had a number of extensive researches made on how it is connected with emotion and personality perception but little on pitch itself alone. (It was usually studied with other prosodic factors.) Plus it's not as subjective as loudness and easier to manipulate than rate of speech.

The group initially wanted to study the six basic emotions and the five factors of personality, OCEAN but then we realized we were being ambitious. :)) So we picked happiness as our sole emotion because it has not been extensively studied as compared to emotions anger and disgust and agreeableness is more relevant to our initial desire to find a means to judge others. (Agreeable people have been studied in terms of their team performance.)

We conducted extensive pre-tests to validate our materials and with that we move on to the experiment proper!

The research followed the protocol for experimental research. We gathered participants from the subject pool (and begged friends to participate) and 60 female undergraduate students from University of the Philippines-Diliman. We chose to have female participants because in it had been found that significant differences in perception exist between sexes. According to Hall (1978; in Schirmer & Kotz, 2006), women were more adept in decoding nonverbal cues than men.

So we have them go into the room and listen to our recorded message and have them answer some questionnaires. The recorded message was either the original one or the manipulated ones. We manipulated it to have higher or lower pitch using Audacity.

We used the items pertaining to Agreeableness from the International Personality Item Pool Representation of the NEO PI-R test, to rate for agreeableness. (It was available online and free for all! Check it out!) We used the Oxford Happiness scale to rate for happiness.

The experiment itself was a breeze. Participants just went in, listened to the recording, depending on which treatment they’re in they would hear a high pitched, low pitched or a normal pitch recording. After listening they’ll answer the questionnaires. We thank them and we’re done! :D

Now for the results!

I won’t bore you guys with the details but suffice to say statistically our hypotheses were duds. We had insignificant effects both on emotion and agreeableness. So basically, high pitch does not mean high perception of agreeableness and happiness. The same goes for low pitch.

BUT THAT’S OKAY!

Not everything you do has to be validated by statistics! Failure to yield significant results can still say something of the matter.

The group has then surmised that pitch alone is not enough to give out those information, which makes sense since in a real-life setting one does not speak with only his/her pitch varying. (THAT WOULD BE WEIRD.) Our results may have strengthened the fact that to decode information from someone’s voice all prosodic factors must be present.

Though we still have some lingering doubts…

But seriously, we think that maybe our manipulation of the pitch of the recording wasn’t as flawless as we wanted to, or maybe we should’ve made a compound of all male voice ranges. (Our dear friend who volunteered his golden voice was a tenor.) We also think that maybe results would’ve been better if we did a within-subjects design. (Meaning, we had each participant go through all the treatments instead of having them go in for only one.)

To round this post up, basically the group is happy that it’s all done with and even if the results weren’t what we thought it would be at least we did something which is: You can’t a person’s emotion and personality based on the pitch of his/her voice. :P

***

 The group would like to thank the following people:

Thank you Kevin Michael Moalong for lending his voice to the group. You are a most awesome bro. >:D<

Thanks to UP Buklod-Isip who were willing guinea pigs! #buklove

Thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Garin for lending their house to our epic overnight.

Thanks to the random Psych majors who helped us even if they didn't need the to participate in the experiment.

Also the group would like to thank Sir Diwa Quinones for letting them do this experiment kahit hindi ito yung pinass namin dati. HAHA. Also for guiding us and answering our many, many questions. TENKS SIR!

YOU CAN'T TOUCH US!