Survey study demonstrates that vocal emotional sentiment influences political trust evaluations in US adults, indicating trust judgments rely partly on affective states.
Key Points
To examine whether real-time emotional states and vocal sentiment influence survey evaluations of political trust alongside rational reasoning.
Surveyed a US sample using a mobile smartphone methodology that recorded real-time voice responses during political trust evaluations.
Classified respondent audio recordings using computational sentiment analysis and speech emotion recognition techniques.
Respondents expressed a substantial amount of negative sentiment during trust evaluations.
Vocal sentiment significantly predicted trust scores, where positive sentiment increased evaluations and negative sentiment prompted declines.
Granular emotion analysis showed that using happy language and upbeat paralinguistics was uniquely associated with higher trust scores.