Suicidal people can reveal thoughts through their speech tones

Professor Scherer's team analysed the interviews using computer software that identified both verbal and non-verbal cues. Verbal content, such as mentioning death, repeated references to the past or heavy use of first-person pronouns, such as I, me and myself, were all common in the speech of suicidal patients. But what was surprising to researchers were the nonverbal cues. The found marked differences between the way suicidal and non-suicidal subjects spoke. Suicidal subjects had breathier speech, differences in pitch and other subtle changes in the tenseness or harshness of their voices, the experts wrote in the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.