
Presentation by Dr. Ingrid Verduyckt
Voice and personality – what are the links?
Abstract: The idea that a speaker’s voice quality is indicative of his or her personality can be traced back to antiquity. However, today, we still know little about the nature of a possible link between personality and voice. In this presentation, we suggest at first to briefly put the question of the relationship between personality and voice in its historical context. Secondly, we will present a psychobiological model of personality: The Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (RST) (PJ Corr, 2004), which allows us to posit that there is a causal link between personality and voice quality. RST postulates three central neural systems whose reactive sensitivity defines the preferential behaviors of an individual in terms of approach or avoidance. We will see that the central neural structures involved in the three sub-systems envisaged by the RST are structures also involved in the limbic system of vocalization. We then propose a conceptualization of human vocalization as a behavior that can be either of the approach or avoidance type, which allows us to transpose the behavioral predictions from RST to the vocal level. Finally, we discuss directions for future research that this model opens up, and how it could benefit our understanding of vocal motor control as a function of speaker personality.
Bio: Ingrid Verduyckt is an Assistant Professor at the Speech Therapy and Audiology school in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Montreal. She has a Master’s degree in speech pathology from the University of Lund, Sweden, and has a doctoral degree in Psychological Sciences and Education from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. She specializes in voice disorders and has 10 years of clinical experience in the treatment of dysphonia and voice coaching. She conducts research on listener’s perception of voice quality and its impact on speaker perception, as well as on the mechanisms of vocal motor control.
*This presentation will be in English. It is hosted by Prof. Sylvie Hébert (http://www.brams.org/membres/sylvie-hebert/)