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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...

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Autores principales: Teferra, Bazen Gashaw, Borwein, Sophie, DeSouza, Danielle D, Simpson, William, Rheault, Ludovic, Rose, Jonathan
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
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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.
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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
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