Tone of voice can predict if couples will break up
A computer algorithm uses a couple’s tone of voice to predict if a couple will make up or break up.
The algorithm predicted with 79% accuracy, even better than descriptions of the therapy sessions provided by relationship experts. The research was published in Proceedings of Interspeech on September 6, 2015.
Researchers recorded hundreds of conversations from over one hundred couples taken during marriage therapy sessions over two years, and then tracked their marital status for five years. The algorithm uses pitch, intensity, “jitter” and “shimmer” among many – things like tracking warbles in the voice that can indicate moments of high emotion.
A team — led by Shrikanth Narayanan and Panayiotis Georgiou of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering with their doctoral student Md Nasir and collaborator Brian Baucom of University of Utah — then developed an algorithm that broke the recordings into acoustic features using speech-processing techniques.
“It’s not just about studying your emotions,” Narayanan said. “It’s about studying the impact of what your partner says on your emotions.”
“Looking at one instance of a couple’s behavior limits our observational power,” Georgiou said. “However, looking at multiple points in time and looking at both the individuals and the dynamics of the dyad can help identify trajectories of the their relationship.”
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.
“Psychological practitioners and researchers have long known that the way that 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,” Baucom said.
Next, using behavioral signal processing – a framework developed by Narayanan for computationally understanding human behavior – the team plans to use language (e.g., spoken words) and nonverbal information (e.g., body language) to improve the prediction of how effective treatments will be.
