Angry, old, male – and trustworthy? How expressive and person voice characteristics shape listener trust
Authors: Antarika Sen
Yenju Feng
Trevor B Penney
Annett Schirmer
Journal: PLoS ONE (2019)
Discipline: Multidisciplinary
Keywords: trustworthiness impressions; vocal expressive; person characteristics; acoustical profiles; speaker valence

Abstract:  This study examined how trustworthiness impressions depend on vocal expressive and person characteristics and how their dependence may be explained by acoustical profiles. Sentences spoken in a range of emotional and conversational expressions by 20 speakers differing in age and sex were presented to 80 age and sex matched listeners who rated speaker trustworthiness. Positive speaker valence but not arousal consistently predicted greater perceived trustworthiness. Additionally, voices from younger as compared with older and female as compared with male speakers were judged more trustworthy. Acoustic analysis highlighted several parameters as relevant for differentiating trustworthiness ratings and showed that effects largely overlapped with those for speaker valence and age, but not sex. Specifically, a fast speech rate, a low harmonic-to-noise ratio, and a low fundamental frequency mean and standard deviation differentiated trustworthy from untrustworthy, positive from negative, and younger from older voices. Male and female voices differed in other ways. Together, these results show that a speaker's expressive as well as person characteristics shape trustworthiness impressions and that their effect likely results from a combination of low-level perceptual and higher-order conceptual processes. 

Retracted: Yes

PubPeer comments:
 2020 retraction. https: journals.plos.org plosone article?id=10.1371 journal.pone.0229473 After this article [1] was published, the authors notified the journal that the voice frequency and intensity analyses forming part of the reported study were done incorrectly in that they did not exclude pauses or unvoiced elements. The authors also subsequently noted small errors in the computation of the F0 trace due to inconsistent voicing (e.g., fry). To address these issues, they revised the acoustic analyses, and also repeated all of the statistical analyses with adjusted modelling approaches. This showed that the results and conclusions reported in the original article were not consistently supported or replicated. Specifically, the results and conclusions depending on voice acoustics were substantially affected by the analysis errors, whereas results and conclusions as regards to speaker affect, age and sex changed minimally. A member of PLOS ONEu2019s Editorial Board reviewed the reanalyses and advised that the main conclusions of the article are no longer supported. Given the extent to which the analysis issues impact the results and conclusions of the article, the authors retract this article. The authors plan to publish an updated version of the article that reports the corrected analyses, results, and conclusions. All authors agreed with retraction. Reference 1.Schirmer A, Feng Y, Sen A, Penney TB (2019) Angry, old, maleu2013and trustworthy? How expressive and person voice characteristics shape listener trust. PLoS ONE 14(1): e0210555. https: doi.org 10.1371 journal.pone.0210555 pmid:30650135 ,