Affect-induced changes in speech production

To determine how sad affect (or brief sad mood) interacts with paralinguistic aspects of speech, we investigated the effect of a happy or sad mood induction on speech production in 49 healthy volunteers. Several speech parameters measuring speech rate, loudness and pitch were examined before and after a standardized mood-induction procedure that involved viewing facial expressions. Speech samples were collected during the self-initiated reading of emotionally neutral sentences; there was no explicit demand to produce mood-congruent speech. Results indicated that, after the mood induction, the speech of participants in the sad group was slower, quieter and more monotonous than the speech of participants in the happy group. This speech paradigm provides a model for studying how changes in mood states interact with the motor control of speech.