Not worth my time! Understanding factors that make speech socially engaging.

What is it about?

What makes us want to stay engaged in a conversation? How do we modulate our voices to be engaging? Excited to share our new paper, "Not Worth My Time! Understanding Factors That Make Speech Socially Engaging". We found that speakers tend to speak louder, vary their loudness more, and increase both pitch and vocal brightness to convey a positive relational stance and foster sustained interactions ("engaging speech"). On the listener side, we found a clear dissociation between relational and reward valuations: social impressions of the speaker were driven mainly by how they spoke (prosody), whereas how much time listeners were willing to extend a hypothetical conversation was driven primarily by what the conversation was about (semantic content). Ultimately, our findings suggest that what is said and how it is said shape the subjective value of social interactions through complementary processes.

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Photo by Amari Shutters on Unsplash

Photo by Amari Shutters on Unsplash