Speech Likability and Personality-Based Social Relations: A Round-Robin Analysis over Communication Channels

The Social Relations Model is well-known for analyses of interpersonal attraction. As a novelty in this paper, the model is applied to assess different effects on likability ratings from speech only. A group of 30 unacquainted participants is considered in our experiment. Their voices were recorded and transmitted through communication channels, and ratings of speech likability and speaker personality were then collected from the same individuals following a round-robin approach. This setup enabled us to detect the influence of participants’ personality and of narrowband and wideband speech on the sources of variance according to the Social Relations Model. An analysis of acoustic correlates of speech likability has also been conducted, which shows differences in the relevance of speech features and in the description of likability ratings depending on the speech bandwidth.