Speaker Charisma Analyzed through the Cultural Lens

Abstract

Speaker charisma is conveyed through multiple aspects: ideas, visions, and perceivable verbal and non-verbal behaviors. Among these perceivable behaviors, probably the most prominent are the acoustic features of one’s voice. We present here a cross-cultural study on charismatic speech. We conducted a combination of acoustic-prosodic analysis and perceptual experiment on the speeches given by presenters from 6 countries on 4 continents to shed initial light on the cultural differences in producing and perceiving speaker charisma, as well as on the impact of speaker gender. Results show that charisma production and perception are affected by prosodic features to different extents across both countries and speaker genders.