Way of Speaking With Your Partner Can Predict the Health of Your Relationship

A tool that can predict whether your romantic relationship would improve or worsen with nearly 80 percent accuracy has been developed based on the tone of voice that you use when speaking to your partner.

The new computer algorithm did a better job of predicting marital success of couples with serious marital issues than descriptions of the therapy sessions provided by relationship experts, the study said.

‘How well do you understand the emotions of your partner? A tool predicts the health of a romantic relationship based on the conversation between couples.’

"It is not just about studying your emotions. It is about studying the impact of what your partner says on your emotions," said one of the lead researchers Shrikanth Narayanan from University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering in the US.

Researchers recorded hundreds of conversations from over one hundred couples taken during marriage therapy sessions over two years, and then tracked their marital status for five years.

They then developed an algorithm that broke the recordings into acoustic features using speech-processing techniques.

These included pitch, intensity, "jitter" and "shimmer" among many - things like tracking warbles in the voice that can indicate moments of high emotion.

"What you say is not the only thing that matters, it is very important how you say it. Our study confirms that it holds for a couple's relationship as well," Md Nasir from University of Southern California explained.

The program was tested against behavioral analyses made by human experts, who had coded them for positive qualities like "acceptance" or negative qualities like "blame."

The team found that studying voice directly -- rather than the expert-created behavioral codes -- offered a more accurate glimpse at a couple's future.

The research was published in the journal Proceedings of Interspeech.

Source: IANS