MasterVox: Stress, Affective State & Voice 1.5

The App provides directly interpretable biofeedback when monitoring (1) general health and well-being; (2) effects of chronic stress; and (3) risk of depression. Thus, the App helps to do something about it where necessary. For details see “https://ifma-health.com/Left06s.php” or download the manual at “https://ifma-health.com/voxManual_E.php” (available in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish).

Getting to Know Yourself Better

Get involved and learn more about the complex interplay between body and mind under chronic stress caused, for example, by modern work conditions or by tight schedules and frequent exams in college/university.

● Learn more about your affects, the evolutionarily very old processes deep inside your body. Affects such as aggression, fear, anger, happiness, sadness, grief, or love, can be triggered through internal and external events, and are often accompanied by bodily reactions, such as sweat, rapidly increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, or dizziness.
● Learn how regular voice recordings can improve your coping behavior under stress, so that you feel more comfortable, for example, when speaking in public.

Get involved and learn how low mood reduces the dynamic expressiveness of your voice and how your voice sounds when it regains energy, vivacity and spiritedness.

● Find out how helpful it is to go for a 20-minute walk, to ride a bicycle, or to do sports.
● And best of all: getting involved on a routine basis is a great remedy to better cope with the ups and downs of real life.

Background

Chronic stress can lead to serious health problems and can affect nearly every system of the human body. For a certain percentage of the general population, chronic stress raises blood pressure, increases the risk of heart attack and stroke, suppresses the immune system, and increases the vulnerability to psychiatric disorders such as depression or anxiety disorders. Health surveys indicate that the stress-induced burden is linked to a pronounced lack of coping skills which can let things escalate on the long run.

Human speech is greatly influenced by the speakers’ affective state which reflects feelings like sadness, happiness, grief, guilt, fear, anger, aggression, faintheartedness, shame, love, stress, or doziness — and, occasionally, depressive or psychotic symptoms. Attentive listeners discover a lot about the affective state of their dialog partners without having to talk about it explicitly (e.g., on the phone). Hectic and abrupt, or delayed and monotonous speaking behavior can be indicators of stress-related or affective problems (depression, anxiety disorders) when such behavior persists over a longer time.

Our normative speech studies of 5 major languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish; 600 test persons) have shown that speaking behavior and voice sound characteristics can be quantified in a reproducible and language-independent way. Based on these normative data we have developed the easy-to-use “voice app” application for the analysis of speaking behavior and voice sound characteristics over time.

On the basis of repeated 2-minute voice recordings at 1-day intervals, the “voice app” allows users to monitor (1) general health and well-being; (2) the effects of chronic stress; and (3) the risk of depression or anxiety disorders. Specifically, the “voice app” estimates the test person’s individual “baseline” and computes the variations around this baseline in positive and negative direction.

In this context it is worth noting that short-term deviations from “normal” values in the range of 1-2 days are constituents of human life and do not require specific action.

However, voice recordings on a regular basis will improve coping behavior under stress.