Welcome to CCPP

Welcome to the home page of Cross-Cultural Personality Percpetion (CCPP), Indo-Swiss Joint Research Project involving:

The project has started on May 1st, 2009 and will last for three years. Its goal is to investigate the relationships between culture and nonverbal behavior when it comes to personality perception. The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Are you curious about this project? Contact the Principal Investigator.

Aug 9, 2010

Abstract

Psychologists have shown that there is a correlation between nonverbal characteristics of speaking on one side, and personality traits as perceived by the listeners on the other side. For example, individuals that speak loud are perceived as more extroverted than individuals that speak soft, and individuals that speak fast are perceived as more brilliant than individuals that speak slow. The problem is that the mapping between nonverbal characteristics of speaking and perceived personality traits is, in many cases, culture dependent. In other words, the above examples are known to apply in southern Europe, but they can be wrong when applied in other cultural areas.

The goal of this project is to develop systems that address the above problem by "translating" automatically the personality of a speaker. This means that the nonverbal characteristics of a speaker, giving rise to certain personality perceptions in a given culture, should be modified automatically to give rise to the same personality perceptions in another culture. For example, the recording of a southern Mediterranean person speaking loud and fast should be modified so that the resulting voice has the nonverbal characteristics of an extrovert and brilliant person (see the above example) in the culture of a listener coming from an area different from southern Europe.

The project can be described as an application of personality psychology findings to speech analysis and synthesis. In fact, the project starts from the correlation between physical characteristics of the voice and personality traits and leads to engineering applications where 1) natural voices are analyzed to infer personality perceptions from physical characteristics, and 2) synthetic voices are modified to elicit desired personality perceptions.

Publications

  • Gelareh Mohammadi and Alessandro Vinciarelli
    Automatic Attribution of Personality Traits Based on Prosodic Features
    In Proceedings of ACM Multimedia Workshop on Social Signal Processing, Arizona, USA, 2011.

  • Gelareh Mohammadi and Alessandro Vinciarelli
    Humans as Feature Extractors: Combining Prosody and Personality Perception for Better Speaking Style Recognition
    In Proceeding of IEEE Int. Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Special Sessions, Alaska, 2011.

  • Gelareh Mohammadi, Marcello Mortillaro and Alessandro Vinciarelli
    The Voice of Personality: Mapping Nonverbal Vocal Behavior into Trait Attributions
    In Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Workshop on Social Signal Processing, pp. 17-20, Florence, 2010.

  • Hugues Salamin, Gelareh Mohammadi, Khiet Truong and Alessandro Vinciarelli
    More than Words: Inference of Socially Relevant Information from Nonverbal Vocal Cues in Speech
    In "Toward Autonomous, Adaptive, and Context-Aware Multimodal Interfaces: Theoretical and Practical Issues", A.Esposito (ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 6456, Springer, pp. 24-34, 2010.

  • Alessandro Vinciarelli and Gelareh Mohammadi
    Towards a Technology of Nonverbal Communication
    In "Affective Computing and Interaction: Psychological, Cognitive and Neuroscientific Perspectives" by D. Gokcay & G. Yildirim (eds.), 2011.

  • Hugues Salamin, Gelareh Mohammadi, Khiet Truong and Alessandro Vinciarelli
    Automatic Role Recognition Based on Conversational and Prosodic Behaviour
    In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimedia, pp. 847-850, Florence, 2010.

    • Presentations

  • Gelareh Mohammadi
    Voice of Personality: Mapping Nonverbal Vocal Behavior into Trait Attributions