Tough day at work causes you to speak faster and with more intensity, study finds
How a hard day at work can change your STEM: Stressful experiences during the day can make you talk faster and more intensely at night, research shows
- Experts have analyzed recordings of people speaking every night after work
- People spoke faster with more intensity if they had experienced more tensions
- Stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, leading to hormone production
- This leads to bronchodilation, higher respiratory rates and changes in our voice
A hard day at the office changes our voices, a study suggests.
Researchers analyzed recordings of people talking every night after work for a week.
They also asked them to report on the stressors they experienced that day and their perceived stress levels.
When they analyzed the voice recordings using computer software, they noticed some clear changes on the days when people reported more stressors.
They found that people spoke faster and more intensely if they had been under more stress that day, regardless of how stressed they were feeling.
A hard day at the office changes our voices, a study suggests. Researchers found that people spoke faster and more intensely if they had more daily stresses
The researchers now hope their findings can be used to help people track their daily stress levels so they can better manage them.
Voice recordings would be an objective measure that wouldn’t rely on a person noticing how much stress they might be under, they suggested.
Study author Dr. Markus Langer, of the University of Saarland in Germany, said that stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, leading to the production of hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline.
This can lead to bronchodilation – opening of the airways – and increased breathing rate, which can increase the intensity or volume of the voice and the rate of speech.
His team has now suggested that voice recording technology could be used to help people monitor stress.
Given the ubiquity of wearable technologies and microphone sensors in smartphones and smart speakers, such as Amazon’s Echo, it could be possible to [i.e. repeated over a period of time] speech data providing insight into human stress levels,” they wrote in their research paper.
“As stress is a universal cause of health problems, this could help monitor the daily impact of stressors and facilitate early detection of stress, potentially contributing to better well-being.”
For the study, which is published in the journal psychological science111 people between the ages of 19 and 59 completed the voting diaries over a seven-day period, from Sunday to Sunday.
The participants worked in a variety of professions, including medical and healthcare, consulting, engineering and administration.
They used their smartphones to send voice messages in which they responded to a series of four questions about their day posed by a chatbot.
They also completed a series of daily self-reports on their daily work stressors and perceived stress level.
Because long-term stressors such as debt and health problems can also contribute to changes in voice functions, the researchers also asked people to include these on the first Sunday of the task so they could factor this into their analysis.