Nowadays it actually looks as if the determination of your personality is the highest of goals for many. In fact, quite a few personality tests exist on the internet. Such tests promise to discover the „real you“, identify your personality traits and even find the related pop culture icon you share common traits with. It is undisputed that research into one’s own personality is important and essential.
By knowing your personality you might have better undertanding of different reactions, perceptions, your strenghts and weaknesses. Those quizzes didn’t change the format since decades. Current the format of personality analysis is changing since technical possibilities are also increasing.
Is it possible to make any reliable statements about your personality using your voice? Basically are individual differences in voices linked to actual individual differences in personality traits? Are vocal characteristics indeed valid cues to personality?
Importance of your voice
While other peoples’ physical appearance might be an important cue to our social evaluations, peoples’ voices are another factor that influences socially relevant impressions. So while hearing somebody on the phone or TV, we are able to form some opinion or imaginations about this person. Only based on the vocal information. Indeed there are a lot of studies reporting voice characteristics predict mate choice, courtship outcomes and reproductive success. In fact the voice is highly related to the biological peculiarities of a human body. As we speak, our entire body is stressed: lungs, ventilation duct, vocal folds, facial muscles. The brain also makes an immense contribution. The rate of vocal fold vibrations, which influences perceptions of pitch, usually equated with fundamental frequency, e.g. how high or deep a voice sounds.
Given that there is an assumption that the pitch of your voice revialing much about your personality. Due to that low pitch sounds are connected to dominant, honest, intelligent, and attractive people. Furthermore, people with higher pitched voices have been perceived to be more nervous, less agreeable, and higher in neuroticism.
So is it valid to pretend that your voice will revieal something about your personality?
Association between your voice and your personality
There is study describing first results of an interconnection between the voice and the personality. But first things first. Let’s focus on the methodology. To validate any linkage between the voice pitch and the personality, acoustic parameters to be measured and personality traits to be self-reported. So the participants were instructed to either read an excerpt from a standardized voice passage, which have been recorded. The recordings are of a neutral content, in which pitch variation is usually very small. During the evaluation of the recordings and computing of the results is was possible to detect some matches between the voice and the personality. Particulary the preprint report from the University of Göttingen shows the association between voice pitch and formant position with different self-reported personality traits. Results indicate that participants with lower voice pitch self-report as higher on dominance,extraversion and more unrestricted on sociosexual behavior. Exploratory analyses suggest that participants with lower voice pitch self-report as lower on neuroticism, higher on openness to experience, and as more unrestricted on sociosexual orientation, sociosexual attitudes and sociosexual desire. Of course further investigations are required to shed more light into this topic, but the first evidence is provided.