Are They Cheating? Research Says Voice May Betray Them
Christopher Philip
New research by Albright College associate professor of psychology Susan Hughes, Sally Farley Division of Applied Behavioral Sciences University of Baltimore and Jack LaFayette director of Institutional Research, Albright College says that his or her voice may be a dead giveaway to a lovers intensions. The study says that men and women alter their voices when speaking to a lover versus speaking with friends and those differences can potentially be used to detect infidelity.
“It’s not just that we change the sound of our voice, but that others can easily perceive those changes,” said Hughes, an expert in evolutionary psychology and voice perception. The findings are reported in a new study titled “People Will Know We Are in Love: Evidence of Differences Between Vocal Samples Directed Toward Lovers and Friends,” published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.
Much research had previously been directed to how individuals change their voices during different emotional motivational states, but little has been directed toward voice modulation in romantic relationships. The researches wanted to know if people’s voices indicate their romantic interest and if others could detect newly minted lovers.
The research was carried out by having subjects who were newly in love, 24 in total, make a brief telephone conversation with a same-sex friend and one to a romantic partner. They were instructed to engage in a 5 minute conversation and ask specific questions such as “how are you?” and “what are you doing?” to provide a uniform phrase for which comparable pitch analysis could be performed. The rest of the conversation was relatively unstructured, although they were asked to refrain from using terms of romantic endearment such as “honey.”
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Recordings of the conversations where then replayed to 80 independent raters who reported the samples for sexiness, pleasantness and degree of romantic interest. The raters only heard one side of the conversation, and in some cases, for only 2 seconds.
The raters were correctly able to predict whether a caller was speaking with a friend or lover. “Vocal samples directed toward romantic partners were rated as sounding more pleasant, sexier and reflecting greater romantic interest than those directed toward same-sex friends,” according to the article.
The researchers then performed a spectrogram analysis on the samples to measure the pitch. Interestingly, they found that when women used the phrase “how are you?” they tended to use a deeper pitch when talking with their romantic lovers and men tended to use a higher pitch. It was suggested in the article that there is a desire to mimic or match the pitch in others to create sameness. This effect “represents desire for affiliation and intimacy” and is a “way to communicate affection and relational connection – ‘I am one with you.’”
Interestingly, when the samples were stripped of their content while they maintained elements of inflection and intonation, they found significant stress, nervousness and lack of confidence in the voice of lovers. Inflection in linguistics is defined as the changes in pitch or tone. Inflection is a change in pitch at the end of a sentence to indicate a question, for example. Intonation is the variation in spoken pitch which has a range of functions such as indicating attitudes and emotions of the speaker.
The results surprised the researchers and were attributed to the sheer emotional commitment to those newly in love. “There was vulnerability associated with the voices of those newly in love. Perhaps people don’t want to be rejected,” said Hughes.
While the results might seem intuitive, it is important to realize, says the report, that listeners had minimal exposure to the conversations in order to make these accurate conclusions. Some of the voice samples only lasted 20 seconds from one side and due to deletions of silence and terms of romantic endearment rendering the conversations virtually meaningless, the raters still found significant differences between the two samples. Even when listening to 2 seconds of speech, the “how are you?” question, raters were still able to detect whom the callers were speaking.
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Resources
Sally D. Farley, Susan M. Hughes, Jack N. LaFayette. People Will Know We Are in Love: Evidence of Differences Between Vocal Samples Directed Toward Lovers and Friends. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 2019; 37 (3): 123.
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