Your tone tells if love is on the rocks

27 November 2015 - 02:39 By Madhumita Murgia, ©The Daily Telegraph

A new algorithm can predict whether a married couple's relationship improves or worsens over time, based on their tone of voice when speaking to each other. The algorithm, which was correct 79% of the time, was more accurate than session notes provided by counsellors and therapists when predicting the marital success of couples with serious relationship issues.Invented by researchers at the University of Southern California, the algorithm is based on hundreds of conversations with 134 couples taken during marriage counselling sessions.The algorithm breaks the conversations down, using speech processing technology, into acoustic characteristics - volume, pitch, intensity, jitter and shimmer - which can measure whether someone's voice is shaking or warbling, perhaps due to emotion.These features are then tracked across multiple therapy sessions to model the pattern of emotional changes that couples go through."It's not just about studying your emotions," said Shrikanth Narayanan, who led the team."It's about studying the impact of what your partner says on your emotions."Once the algorithm had been trained to spot patterns, it was pitted against behavioural analyses made by experts.The algorithm came out on top, with 79% accuracy against therapists' 75%.The marital outcome of couples in therapy has been interesting to psychologists for many years, because of the lack of objective measures to track progress.This algorithm could finally be a scientific tool to help counsellors tailor and personalise therapy sessions.To improve the accuracy of the algorithm even further, Narayanan's team plans to also include words and body language as part of the predictive features. ..

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