Vocal cues to deception: A comparative channel approach

Abstract

The study investigated the leakage potential of different voice and speech cues using a cue isolation and masking design. Speech samples taken from an earlier experiment were used in which 15 female students of nursing dissimulated negative affect produced by an unpleasant movie or told the truth about positive af[ect following a pleasant movie. Several groups of judges rated these speech samples in five conditions: (1) forward or clear, (2) electronic filtering, (3) random splicing, (4) backwards, (5) pitch inversion, (6) tone-silence sequences. The results show that vocal cues do indeed carry leakage information and that, as reflected in the differences among the conditions masking different types of cues respectively, voice quality cues may be centrally" implicated. In addition, gender differences in decoding ability are discussed.The question of whether deception can be detected on the basis of a variety of behavioral cues provided by the deceiver has sparked a sizable number of studies in the past decades. First tried to assess the possibility of using polygraph methods for lie detection (Orne, Thackray, & Paskewitz, 1972;Lykken, 1974;Podlesny & Raskin, 1977). Then the interest of psychologists studying nonverbal behavior was awakened by Ekman and Friesen's (1969) seminal article on "nonverbal leakage and clues to deception." Initially attention was directed primarily to nonvocal aspects of behavior, particularly the face and the body (Ekman & Friesen, 1974). More recently, the vocal channel of communication has been studied intensively in terms of its potential for the detection of deception (see Scherer, 1981; Zuckerman, DePaulo, & Rosenthal, 1981, for overviews).In many studies of the nonverbal behavior of deceivers, the instruments of detection were naive human observers who were presented with samples of deceiver behavior in different channels of communication (such as audio, visual, or audiovisual combined). The purpose of these studies was to assess the degree to which a particular channel leaks information about deception (Ekman, Friesen, & Scherer, 1976;Ekman, Friesen, O'Sullivan, & Scherer, 1980; DePaulo, Zuckerman, & Rosenthai, 1980). Contrary to cue measurement studies in which objective coding methods are used to determine the covariation of deception with particular facial or vocal cues (see Ekman & Friesen, 1974;Ekman, et al., 1976;Scherer, 1979Scherer, , 1981, the observer-attribution method makes it difficult to isolate the particular cues that carry the leakage and that allow observers to attribute deception correctly. One approach to identifying potentially significant cues is to use cue-masking and isolation methods (Scherer & Scherer, 1982). The masking of content in speech has a venerable history in vocal communication research (Starkweather, 1956) and has since been further refined (See Scherer, 1982).In the collaborative study reported here, many of the available masking and isolation techniques for vocal cues were used with the same set of speech samples from a study investigating ...

The role of intonation in emotional expressions

“…Once we have the appropriate corpus, preferably produced with actors from different cultures and language groups, we could use some of the techniques for signal masking and feature destruction that allow us to determine which aspects of a signal need to be retained to carry recognizability. The fact that, in the past, random-splicing procedures (which destroy intonation and sequential information but keep voice quality) have worked better, in the sense of preserving recognition accuracy, than content-filtering methods (which keep intonation but mask essential aspects of voice quality; Scherer et al, 1985) suggests that intonation contours (at least in terms of shape) may be less important signatures of emotions than global F0 level and variation and spectral aspects of voice quality.…”

“…However, evidence for the participation of intonation (pitch/F0 contours) in the communication of emotional meaning can be derived from studies that have not attempted to describe specific contours for specific emotions, but primarily tried to assess the respective importance of intonation and voice quality (voice timbre) for the communication of emotional meaning. Starting in the early sixties, several authors tried to separate the contribution of voice quality and of intonation by using various signal manipulation techniques (see for example Scherer et al, 1985). The following paragraphs describe the results obtained by two studies (Ladd et al, 1985;Lieberman and Michaels, 1962) demonstrating that isolated aspects of intonation can contribute to the communication of emotional meaning and two further studies (Scherer et al, 1984;Uldall, 1964) indicating that intonation patterns might influence emotional or attitudinal attributions in combination with the linguistic content of the expressions.…”

Emotional speech: Towards a new generation of databases

“…Note, though, that these techniques can force the verbal content into a very specific and atypical mode. Studies of a similar type, not described in the table, are (Scherer et al, 1985;Bachorowski and Owren, 1995;Karlsson et al, 1998).…”

The Problem of Studying of the Human Ability to Perception of Speech Markers of Personality Traits

“…Изучая паралингвистические индикаторы обмана, К. Шерер с соавт. (1985) обнаружили, что главным критерием восприятия этой характеристики через голосовой канал является качество голоса «высокая экспрессивность»: повышение средней и вариативности F0, более акцентированное произношение [23]. Последние исследования показывают, что при обмане объективно наблюдается возрастание F0, но, кроме того, повышение числа пауз и слов, возрастают индексы красноречия и беглости [3].…”