Do charismatic people produce charismatic speech? On the relationship between the Big Five personality traits and prosodic features of speaker charisma in female speakers

While early research on charismatic communication focused on charismatic language and more specifically rhetoric strategies, recent studies increasingly reveal the acoustic-prosodic features of charismatic speech. Furthermore, the development of the PASCAL score provided a complex metric which assesses the charisma level of a speaker’s acoustic voice profile. While this measurement of charismatic speech is attributional and hence assesses charisma through its impact on the listener, we may ask whether speakers whose voices are perceived as charismatic embody certain charismatic personality traits. We assessed the PASCAL charisma score as well as its individual acoustic features of 30 female speakers and correlated them with the Big Five personality traits. The results suggest that charismatic speech is not correlated with a charismatic personality, which supports the hypothesis that charismatic speech constitutes a skill that needs to be learned and is largely independent of personality. However, certain personality facets may facilitate speaker charisma and are correlated with acoustic features that make up charismatic speech. Specifically, assertiveness and activity correlate with a more charismatic f0 mean, articulation rate as well as phrase duration for female speakers, while facets such as anxiety, diligence and surprisingly gregariousness seem to be detrimental to speaker charisma.