In our previous blog post, we discussed the possibility of determining someone’s mental state by just hearing 30 seconds of audio.
While ideally, it would be great to see their body language, gestures and other nonverbal behavior, this is not always possible.
Its important to understand that in order to completely understand someone’s mental state, you will need to baseline the person, even though its through audio. What this means is that you will need to determine what their normal rate of speech is, how they answer questions, their tone of voice, speed in which they answer the question, etc is when they are asked non-threatening questions.
From there, notice deviations from that baseline. Do they stutter a lot more when answering? Do they take a much longer time to answer than normal? Does their tone of voice change? These are all questions you can ask yourself when listening to audio.
Take a listen to the example below. Its an interview with Elizabeth Edwards on NPR.
Listen to about the first 2 minutes of the interview- Edwards is a little choppy in her speaking, but answers the questions fairly quickly and fluidly.
Now fast forward to about 6:30 when Edwards is asked about John Edward’s daughter, Trinity, whom he had with his mistress, Rielle Hunter. Notice the dramatic change in the tone of voice, speech, her stuttering, and length of answer. Her mental state is clearly not the same as it was previously.