ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Cracking the social code of speech prosody using reverse correlation.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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36 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 95 citations in OpenAlex.
- How do voice acoustics affect the perceived trustworthiness of a speaker? A systematic review.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Can conceptual beliefs shape impressions from voices?Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- The Sound of Emotional Prosody: Nearly 3 Decades of Research and Future Directions.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Human voices communicating trustworthy intent: A demographically diverse speech audio dataset.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Mate assessment based on physical characteristics: a review and reflection.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- FastACI: a toolbox for investigating auditory perception using reverse correlation.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- The Scope and Limits of Iconic Prosody: Head Angle PredictsOpen mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Aligning the smiles of dating dyads causally increases attraction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- A simple psychophysical procedure separates representational and noise components in impairments of speech prosody perception after right-hemisphere stroke.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- From pre-processing to advanced dynamic modeling of pupil data.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Cultural facial expressions dynamically convey emotion category and intensity information.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- Advancing Naturalistic Affective Science with Deep Learning.Affective science · 2023Review
- Stimulus whitening improves the efficiency of reverse correlation.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- Auditory dyadic interactions through the "eye" of the social brain: How visual is the posterior STS interaction region?Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2023Article
- Beyond Broca: neural architecture and evolution of a dual motor speech coordination system.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2023Article
- Mental representations of speech and musical pitch contours reveal a diversity of profiles in autism spectrum disorder.Autism : the international journal of research and practice · 2023Article
- Article
- Algorithmic voice transformations reveal the phonological basis of language-familiarity effects in cross-cultural emotion judgments.PloS one · 2023Article
- Modelling representations in speech normalization of prosodic cues.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Segmental and suprasegmental encoding of speaker confidence in Wuxi dialect vowels.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
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4 authors at 2 institutions in 4 countries.
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Abstract
Human listeners excel at forming high-level social representations about each other, even from the briefest of utterances. In particular, pitch is widely recognized as the auditory dimension that conveys most of the information about a speaker's traits, emotional states, and attitudes. While past research has primarily looked at the influence of mean pitch, almost nothing is known about how intonation patterns, i.e., finely tuned pitch trajectories around the mean, may determine social judgments in speech. Here, we introduce an experimental paradigm that combines state-of-the-art voice transformation algorithms with psychophysical reverse correlation and show that two of the most important dimensions of social judgments, a speaker's perceived dominance and trustworthiness, are driven by robust and distinguishing pitch trajectories in short utterances like the word "Hello," which remained remarkably stable whether male or female listeners judged male or female speakers. These findings reveal a unique communicative adaptation that enables listeners to infer social traits regardless of speakers' physical characteristics, such as sex and mean pitch. By characterizing how any given individual's mental representations may differ from this generic code, the method introduced here opens avenues to explore dysprosody and social-cognitive deficits in disorders like autism spectrum and schizophrenia. In addition, once derived experimentally, these prototypes can be applied to novel utterances, thus providing a principled way to modulate personality impressions in arbitrary speech signals.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.