You had me at "Hello"! It turns out our opening words speak volumes--people take less than a second to form an impression of someone's personality based on their voice alone.   We know that our voices can convey information about our sex, age, even body strength and certain personality characteristics, but Phil McAleer at the University of Glasgow and his colleagues wondered whether we make an instant impression. To find out, they recorded 64 volunteers as they read a passage. They then picked the word "hello" and asked 320 listeners to mark the voices for personality characteristics--including trust, dominance and attractiveness.   Although it's not clear how accurate such immediate judgements are, what is obvious is that we all make them, and very quickly. "We were surprised by just how similar people's marks were," says McAleer.    It makes sense that decisions about personality should happen really fast, says McAleer.   The impression that our voices convey appears to be related to several factors, such as sex differences and age groups, especially the pitch   of voice on the top. For example, the pitch of a person's voice influenced how reliable they seemed. "A guy who raises his pitch becomes more trustworthy," says McAleer. "Whereas a girl who changes from a high to a low pitch is seen as more trustworthy than a girl whose voice goes up at the end of the word."   It is possible to change some of these aspects of your voice, he says. "It has been said that Margaret Thatcher and the Queen were both trained to make their voices appear more dominant." Some aspects, though, can't be changeable.    "The methods used in this paper are familiar, but the conclusions are new and very interesting," says Jody Kreiman, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. The way the study links personality to attractiveness and reproductive fitness makes sense biologically, she says.   The team hope that their work can be used to help create artificial voices for people who have lost their own due to a medical condition, as well as creating lovely and charming voices for satnavs  , and other robotics. "You might also use this kind of work to find the right person to front a team," says McAleer, "you don't want a really unreliable voice running your call centre." The study by Phil McAleer and his colleagues aims to find out     .
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