Wait a minute, shouldn’t that header say “A smiling face”? No; voices can show a smile too. Researchers videotaped test subjects who were answering questions in an increasingly silly interview, and identified on the videotape four different levels of smile, ranging from no smile at all to a full-out grin. Then people who hadn’t seen the video were given just the audio portion to listen to, and it turned out that they were pretty good at identifying the different types of smiles just from characteristics of the voice. Voice communication has emoticons beat when it comes to conveying subtle nuances of emotion, and this is a good example of that. This article from Science Daily has more information.
A smiling voice
It sure would be neat if they could control for the content of the exchange. An English-speaking listener will be able to tell when an English-speaker is smiling because if we have been following the story, we will also be smiling. There’s always tomorrow…when all this stuff gets quantified.