Dr B Vaughan
No more applications being accepted
About the Project
The goal of this research is to examine how depression affects a person’s speech in order to develop tools and methods for the detection and treatment of depressive illness. The research will build upon existing research on depressed speech and will examine important socio-communicative non-verbal speech characteristics, such as prosodic accommodation, that can be used to measure rapport and involvement between speakers. This has the potential to provide advanced insights into the depressive state of a patient, including a determination of depression severity. The outcomes of the research will further be used to develop mobile applications to augment current clinical practices, and to aid and monitor depressed patients in a non-clinical setting.
Depression is a relatively common phenomenon, affecting two in ten people in Ireland during their lifetime. Research by the World Health Organisation states that 1 in 15 people across the WHO European Region currently suffer from depression, which is approximately 49 Million people. It is an affective disorder, characterised by a number of different factors that may be present in a number of different combinations and severities.
People engaged in conversation tend to adapt their communicative behaviour to that of their interlocutor, with numerous terms being used to describe this phenomenon, particularly with regards to speech: accommodation, synchrony, mimicry, convergence, alignment and entrainment. Vocal accommodation occurs between speakers when changes in their prosodic parameters move in synchronous alignment or when they converge towards a common point; it is a particularly important aspect of social interaction as it facilitates comprehension and understanding between interlocutors. In addition, accommodation participates in increasing the social success of the interaction in terms of rapport (i.e. harmonious relation and mutual attention) and affiliation. Numerous studies have found that depression induces measurable, manifest, changes in a person’s speech that can be indicative of depression severity or even suicidal ideation.