Social Attractiveness in Dialogs

This study investigates how acoustic and lexical properties of spontaneous speech in dialogs affect perceived social attractiveness in terms of speaker likeability, friendliness, competence, and self-confidence. We analyze a database of longer spontaneous dialogs between German female speakers and the mutual ratings that dialog partners assigned to one another after every conversation. Thus the ratings reflect long-term impressions based on dialog behavior. Using linear mixed models, we investigate both classical acoustic-prosodic and lexical parameters as well as parameters that capture the degree of speakers’ adaptation, or “convergence”, of these parameters to each other. Specifically we find that likeability is correlated with the speaker’s lexical convergence as well as with her convergence in f0 peak height. Friendliness is significantly related to variation in intensity. For competence, the proportion of positive words in the dialog, variation in shimmer, and overall phonetic convergence are significant correlates. Self-confidence finally is related to several prosodic, phonetic, and lexical adaptation parameters. In some cases, the effect depends on whether interlocutors also had eye contact during their conversation. Taken together, these findings provide evidence that in addition to classical parameters, convergence parameters play an important role in the mutual perception of social attractiveness.