How altering voice pitch can make you appear more dominant or trustworthy

Your voice can say a lot about your character

Sabrina Barr
Tuesday 27 March 2018 14:04 BST
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The way a person speaks can say far more than the words that come out of their mouth.

By altering the pitch of your voice, you can potentially learn how to assert your dominance when meeting someone new for the first time, according to a scientific study.

Jean-Julien Aucouturier is a speech researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris.

He and a group of researchers decided to investigate the “social code” of speech, by analysing the way in which different pitch variations in a person’s voice can make them instinctively appear more dominant or trustworthy.

Writing in journal PNAS, the team used a method called “reverse correlation” to analyse how pitch variations impact social dynamics between individuals.

They stated that although the influence of “mean pitch” has been previously explored in research, past studies have done little to uncover the significance of “intonation patterns” - how using high and low pitch can impact social judgement.

They concluded that the most effective way to appear dominant when making a new acquaintance is to greet them with a falling pitch.

However, if you’d rather seem like a more trustworthy individual, your greeting should end on a higher note.

To carry out the study, Aucouturier and the team created a computer programme that they named “Cleese”.

They were then able to use this programme to generate thousands of pitch variations of the word “bonjour” (“hello”), having already trialled the programme with the word “vraiment” (“really”).

Two independent groups of participants, 44 people in total, were presented with hundreds of utterances of the French greeting pronounced with different pitch variations and spoken by either one male or one female speaker.

They were then asked to state which of the versions of the word they believed sounded either more dominant or more trustworthy.

The researchers concluded that the men and women assessed typically perceived dominance or trustworthiness implied by pitch in a similar way.

However, the question of whether this experiment would garner the same results in other languages and with more participants remains to be seen.

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