Speech parameter selection for emotional stress characterization in women

A total of 68 acoustical, glottal and biomechanical parameters were extracted from neutral and stressed speech from 31 women. The stress was elicited by asking the speaker to defend her false opinion in a controversial topic. The importance of the parameters was evaluated accordingly to Pearson's coefficient, and the most relevant ones were tested in a SVM classification algorithm. We have found out that the most relevant parameters to characterize stress are pitch and the biomechanical parameters of body mass and body stiffness of the vocal folds.