Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-6018, USA.
Support Care Cancer. 2012 May;20(5):1073-8. doi: 10.1007/s00520-011-1187-8. Epub 2011 May 15.
This study was designed to determine if differences exist in the speaking rate and pitch of healthcare providers when discussing bad news versus neutral topics, and to assess listeners' ability to perceive voice differences in the absence of speech content.
Participants were oncology healthcare providers seeing patients with cancer of unknown primary. The encounters were audio recorded; the information communicated by the oncologist to the patient was identified as neutral or bad news. At least 30 seconds of both bad news and neutral utterances were analyzed; provider voice pitch and speaking rate were measured. The same utterances were subjected to low pass filtering that maintained pitch contours and speaking rate, but eliminated acoustic energy associated with consonants making the samples unintelligible, but with unchanged intonation. Twenty-seven listeners (graduate students in a voice disorders class) listened to the samples and rated them on three features: caring, sympathetic, and competent.
All but one provider reduced speaking rate, the majority also reduced pitch in the bad news condition. Listeners perceived a significant difference between the nonverbal characteristics of the providers' voice when performing the two tasks and rated speech produced with the reduced rate and lower pitch as more caring and sympathetic.
These results suggest that simultaneous assessment of verbal content and multiparameter prosodic analysis of speech is necessary for a more thorough understanding of the expression and perception of empathy. This information has the potential to contribute to the enhancement of communication training design and of oncologists' communication effectiveness.
本研究旨在确定医疗保健提供者在讨论坏消息与中性话题时的语速和音高是否存在差异，并评估在没有言语内容的情况下听众感知声音差异的能力。
参与者为正在为不明原发癌患者就诊的肿瘤学医疗保健提供者。对这些就诊进行录音；根据向患者传达的信息，确定肿瘤学家的沟通内容为中性或坏消息。对至少 30 秒的坏消息和中性话语进行分析；测量提供者的音高和语速。对相同的话语进行低通滤波处理，保留音高轮廓和说话速度，但消除与辅音相关的声能，使样本变得难以理解，但语调不变。27 名听众（语音障碍课程的研究生）听取了这些样本，并根据三个特征对其进行评分：关怀、同情和胜任。
除一名提供者外，所有提供者的语速都有所降低，大多数提供者在坏消息情况下也降低了音高。当执行这两个任务时，听众感知到提供者声音的非言语特征有显著差异，并认为语速降低且音高低的语音更具关怀性和同情心。
这些结果表明，对言语内容的同时评估和对语音的多参数韵律分析对于更全面地理解同理心的表达和感知是必要的。这些信息有可能有助于提高沟通培训设计和肿瘤学家沟通效果。
