The Vocal Expression of Emotion: An Acoustic Analysis of Anxiety

During conversations, speakers are assumed to provide information about their emotional state. This study is a systematic investigation of the voice characteristics of the emotion of anxiety. For this purpose speech samples of 63 subjects were collected in a situation which induced mild anxiety. On the basis of the acoustic measurements it appears that anxiety affects vocal parameters and showed a significant increase in mean F0 and in noise-to-harmonic ratio. In addition, a significant decrease in jitter and F0 range are observed, while there was no change in shimmer. These results applied equally to male and female participants.