Cargando…
Acoustic and Linguistic Features of Impromptu Speech and Their Association With Anxiety: Validation Study
BACKGROUND: The measurement and monitoring of generalized anxiety disorder requires frequent interaction with psychiatrists or psychologists. Access to mental health professionals is often difficult because of high costs or insufficient availability. The ability to assess generalized anxiety disorde...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
---|---|
Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
JMIR Publications
2022
|
Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9308078/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35802401 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/36828 |
_version_ | 1784752909431341056 |
---|---|
author | Teferra, Bazen Gashaw Borwein, Sophie DeSouza, Danielle D Simpson, William Rheault, Ludovic Rose, Jonathan |
author_facet | Teferra, Bazen Gashaw Borwein, Sophie DeSouza, Danielle D Simpson, William Rheault, Ludovic Rose, Jonathan |
author_sort | Teferra, Bazen Gashaw |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: The measurement and monitoring of generalized anxiety disorder requires frequent interaction with psychiatrists or psychologists. Access to mental health professionals is often difficult because of high costs or insufficient availability. The ability to assess generalized anxiety disorder passively and at frequent intervals could be a useful complement to conventional treatment and help with relapse monitoring. Prior work suggests that higher anxiety levels are associated with features of human speech. As such, monitoring speech using personal smartphones or other wearable devices may be a means to achieve passive anxiety monitoring. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to validate the association of previously suggested acoustic and linguistic features of speech with anxiety severity. METHODS: A large number of participants (n=2000) were recruited and participated in a single web-based study session. Participants completed the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale assessment and provided an impromptu speech sample in response to a modified version of the Trier Social Stress Test. Acoustic and linguistic speech features were a priori selected based on the existing speech and anxiety literature, along with related features. Associations between speech features and anxiety levels were assessed using age and personal income as covariates. RESULTS: Word count and speaking duration were negatively correlated with anxiety scores (r=–0.12; P<.001), indicating that participants with higher anxiety scores spoke less. Several acoustic features were also significantly (P<.05) associated with anxiety, including the mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, linear prediction cepstral coefficients, shimmer, fundamental frequency, and first formant. In contrast to previous literature, second and third formant, jitter, and zero crossing rate for the z score of the power spectral density acoustic features were not significantly associated with anxiety. Linguistic features, including negative-emotion words, were also associated with anxiety (r=0.10; P<.001). In addition, some linguistic relationships were sex dependent. For example, the count of words related to power was positively associated with anxiety in women (r=0.07; P=.03), whereas it was negatively associated with anxiety in men (r=–0.09; P=.01). CONCLUSIONS: Both acoustic and linguistic speech measures are associated with anxiety scores. The amount of speech, acoustic quality of speech, and gender-specific linguistic characteristics of speech may be useful as part of a system to screen for anxiety, detect relapse, or monitor treatment. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9308078 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | JMIR Publications |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-93080782022-07-24 Acoustic and Linguistic Features of Impromptu Speech and Their Association With Anxiety: Validation Study Teferra, Bazen Gashaw Borwein, Sophie DeSouza, Danielle D Simpson, William Rheault, Ludovic Rose, Jonathan JMIR Ment Health Original Paper BACKGROUND: The measurement and monitoring of generalized anxiety disorder requires frequent interaction with psychiatrists or psychologists. Access to mental health professionals is often difficult because of high costs or insufficient availability. The ability to assess generalized anxiety disorder passively and at frequent intervals could be a useful complement to conventional treatment and help with relapse monitoring. Prior work suggests that higher anxiety levels are associated with features of human speech. As such, monitoring speech using personal smartphones or other wearable devices may be a means to achieve passive anxiety monitoring. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to validate the association of previously suggested acoustic and linguistic features of speech with anxiety severity. METHODS: A large number of participants (n=2000) were recruited and participated in a single web-based study session. Participants completed the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale assessment and provided an impromptu speech sample in response to a modified version of the Trier Social Stress Test. Acoustic and linguistic speech features were a priori selected based on the existing speech and anxiety literature, along with related features. Associations between speech features and anxiety levels were assessed using age and personal income as covariates. RESULTS: Word count and speaking duration were negatively correlated with anxiety scores (r=–0.12; P<.001), indicating that participants with higher anxiety scores spoke less. Several acoustic features were also significantly (P<.05) associated with anxiety, including the mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, linear prediction cepstral coefficients, shimmer, fundamental frequency, and first formant. In contrast to previous literature, second and third formant, jitter, and zero crossing rate for the z score of the power spectral density acoustic features were not significantly associated with anxiety. Linguistic features, including negative-emotion words, were also associated with anxiety (r=0.10; P<.001). In addition, some linguistic relationships were sex dependent. For example, the count of words related to power was positively associated with anxiety in women (r=0.07; P=.03), whereas it was negatively associated with anxiety in men (r=–0.09; P=.01). CONCLUSIONS: Both acoustic and linguistic speech measures are associated with anxiety scores. The amount of speech, acoustic quality of speech, and gender-specific linguistic characteristics of speech may be useful as part of a system to screen for anxiety, detect relapse, or monitor treatment. JMIR Publications 2022-07-08 /pmc/articles/PMC9308078/ /pubmed/35802401 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/36828 Text en ©Bazen Gashaw Teferra, Sophie Borwein, Danielle D DeSouza, William Simpson, Ludovic Rheault, Jonathan Rose. Originally published in JMIR Mental Health (https://mental.jmir.org), 08.07.2022. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR Mental Health, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on https://mental.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included. |
spellingShingle | Original Paper Teferra, Bazen Gashaw Borwein, Sophie DeSouza, Danielle D Simpson, William Rheault, Ludovic Rose, Jonathan Acoustic and Linguistic Features of Impromptu Speech and Their Association With Anxiety: Validation Study |
title | Acoustic and Linguistic Features of Impromptu Speech and Their Association With Anxiety: Validation Study |
title_full | Acoustic and Linguistic Features of Impromptu Speech and Their Association With Anxiety: Validation Study |
title_fullStr | Acoustic and Linguistic Features of Impromptu Speech and Their Association With Anxiety: Validation Study |
title_full_unstemmed | Acoustic and Linguistic Features of Impromptu Speech and Their Association With Anxiety: Validation Study |
title_short | Acoustic and Linguistic Features of Impromptu Speech and Their Association With Anxiety: Validation Study |
title_sort | acoustic and linguistic features of impromptu speech and their association with anxiety: validation study |
topic | Original Paper |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9308078/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35802401 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/36828 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT teferrabazengashaw acousticandlinguisticfeaturesofimpromptuspeechandtheirassociationwithanxietyvalidationstudy AT borweinsophie acousticandlinguisticfeaturesofimpromptuspeechandtheirassociationwithanxietyvalidationstudy AT desouzadanielled acousticandlinguisticfeaturesofimpromptuspeechandtheirassociationwithanxietyvalidationstudy AT simpsonwilliam acousticandlinguisticfeaturesofimpromptuspeechandtheirassociationwithanxietyvalidationstudy AT rheaultludovic acousticandlinguisticfeaturesofimpromptuspeechandtheirassociationwithanxietyvalidationstudy AT rosejonathan acousticandlinguisticfeaturesofimpromptuspeechandtheirassociationwithanxietyvalidationstudy |