ArticlePloS one2018
Judgements of a speaker's personality are correlated across differing content and stimulus type.
Article in PloS one, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- How do voice acoustics affect the perceived trustworthiness of a speaker? A systematic review.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- How Personality Traits Affect the Perception of Facial and Vocal Attractiveness.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Human voices communicating trustworthy intent: A demographically diverse speech audio dataset.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Speaker differences in volitional voice modulation reflected in empathy and functional activation patterns.PloS one · 2025Article
- Article
- Voice-based judgments of sex, height, weight, attractiveness, health, and psychological traits based on free speech versus scripted speech.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- Comparing accuracy in voice-based assessments of biological speaker traits across speech types.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The Time Course of Person Perception From Voices: A Behavioral Study.Psychological science · 2023Article
- A model for person perception from familiar and unfamiliar voices.Communications psychology · 2023Review
- Individual differences in vocal size exaggeration.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Human voice pitch measures are robust across a variety of speech recordings: methodological and theoretical implications.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Listeners' perceptions of the certainty and honesty of a speaker are associated with a common prosodic signature.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Linking voice pitch to fighting success in male amateur mixed martial arts athletes and boxers.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- The effects of theatre-based vocal empowerment on young Egyptian women's vocal and language characteristics.PloS one · 2021Article
- Linking human male vocal parameters to perceptions, body morphology, strength and hormonal profiles in contexts of sexual selection.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- No evidence for an association between facial fluctuating asymmetry and vocal attractiveness in men or women.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It has previously been shown that first impressions of a speaker's personality, whether accurate or not, can be judged from short utterances of vowels and greetings, as well as from prolonged sentences and readings of complex paragraphs. From these studies, it is established that listeners' judgements are highly consistent with one another, suggesting that different people judge personality traits in a similar fashion, with three key personality traits being related to measures of valence (associated with trustworthiness), dominance, and attractiveness. Yet, particularly in voice perception, limited research has established the reliability of such personality judgements across stimulus types of varying lengths. Here we investigate whether first impressions of trustworthiness, dominance, and attractiveness of novel speakers are related when a judgement is made on hearing both one word and one sentence from the same speaker. Secondly, we test whether what is said, thus adjusting content, influences the stability of personality ratings. 60 Scottish voices (30 females) were recorded reading two texts: one of ambiguous content and one with socially-relevant content. One word (~500 ms) and one sentence (~3000 ms) were extracted from each recording for each speaker. 181 participants (138 females) rated either male or female voices across both content conditions (ambiguous, socially-relevant) and both stimulus types (word, sentence) for one of the three personality traits (trustworthiness, dominance, attractiveness). Pearson correlations showed personality ratings between words and sentences were strongly correlated, with no significant influence of content. In short, when establishing an impression of a novel speaker, judgments of three key personality traits are highly related whether you hear one word or one sentence, irrespective of what they are saying. This finding is consistent with initial personality judgments serving as elucidators of approach or avoidance behaviour, without modulation by time or content. All data and sounds are available on OSF (osf.io/s3cxy).
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