Vocal behaviour affects the expression of empathy in trained and untrained speakers

Establishing trust in counselling professions relies on empathy, yet the acoustic and perceptual aspects of empathic communication remain underexplored. In a two-part study, 10 trained female counsellors and 10 untrained female speakers read sentences in their normal, most empathic, and least empathic voices. Overall, speakers exhibited slower speech, higher initial pitch, greater pitch variation, and higher mean pitch in empathic voices, with differential use of cues with training. A playback task with 207 listeners, unaware of speakers' identities, found both trained and untrained speakers received higher empathy ratings for empathic voices. The study suggests adults can intentionally modify their vocal behaviour to convey empathy, hinting at the potential learnability of this skill. Further research directions on the role of vocal behaviour in empathic communication are proposed.