"High on emotion?" How audio codecs interfere with the perceived charisma and emotional states of men and women

Emotions are an integral part of a speaker’s charismatic impact. Previous studies took started from this impact examined the associated emotional features on the part of the speaker and the recipient. We start here from the emotions themselves and test with a view to, e.g., everyday business communication and based on isolated, enacted stimulus sentences, which emotions make speakers sound more or less charismatic and how this interacts with speaker gender and speech compression. The results of a perception experiment with 21 listeners show that high-arousal emotions make speakers sound more charismatic than low-arousal emotions. Moreover, some compression codes, including the popular MP3 codec, perform surprisingly poorly at differentiating emotions in terms of perceived speaker charisma, particularly in combination with female speakers’ voices.