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Tone of Voice Reveals State of Relationship

Maddy V

PREMIUM

Your tone of voice can reveal more about your relationship state than a therapy session.

The research, published in Proceedings of Interspeech, clearly reveals that the algorithm did a better job of predicting whether or not a couple had serious issues than descriptions of the therapy sessions provided by relationship experts.

It all in HOW you say it

The algorithm broke down the recordings of hundreds of conversations from more than 100 couples taken during marriage therapy sessions into acoustic features using speech-processing techniques such as pitch, intensity, “jitter” and “shimmer,” along with tracking warbles in the voice that can indicate moments of high emotion. The conclusions: It not only matters what you say, it is just as important how you say it. The algorithm shows the impact of what your partner says on your emotions.

Follow the voice not the words

Once it was fine-tuned, the program was then tested against behavioral analyses made by human experts who had coded them for positive qualities like “acceptance” or negative qualities like “blame.” The team found that studying voice directly -- rather than the expert-created behavioral codes -- offered a more accurate glimpse at a couple’s future.

Spoken words and body language

In Sciencedaily one of the researchers says: “Psychological practitioners and researchers have long known that the way partners talk about and discuss problems has important implications for the health of their relationships. However, the lack of efficient and reliable tools for measuring the important elements in those conversations has been a major impediment in their widespread clinical use. These findings represent a major step forward in making objective measurement of behavior practical and feasible for couple therapists." The next step is to study spoken words and body language to improve the prediction of how effective treatments will be. More articles and new friends at SDC