The way in which we speak can give clues to our personalities faster than one might think. According to some communication experts, it only takes 0.2 seconds to determine the confidence level of another person, based merely on their voice. That translates to one fifth of a second! Author and communications professor Vanessa Van Edwards (@vvanedwards ) has shared an Instagram Reel wherein she gives a quick rundown of the theory. Her spin is taking the idea and teaching people how to “sound confident” in just 200 milliseconds. She equates confidence with “leadership” skills and gives a quick step-by-step tutorial on how to embrace it. View this post on Instagram “Peaks in brain activity” Van Edwards begins the clip with a chyron that reads “How to sound confident in 200 milliseconds.” Over her voice she writes, “The Neuroscience: Research shows that event-related potentials…distinct peaks in brain activity…spike in the brain about 200 milliseconds after hearing a voice, spiking much higher when the speech is perceived as confident.” She explains, “One of the mistakes that leaders use when they sense nervousness is that they begin to question. Research has found that someone decides how confident we are within 200 milliseconds of hearing someone speak. I always make sure that my first ten words, I say them in the lowest natural tone that I have, without a question inflection. We don’t like leaders who question.” There are examples. “Question inflection sounds like this. I’m so happy to be HERE?” The uptick on “here” is obvious to make her point. She adds, “My name is Vanessa? Excited to be back?” Stating your mission Instead, she explains, leaders should sound like they have authority over their words. “We want our leaders to ‘tell us.’ We want our leaders to be confident in what they say. And so as a leader, you need to make sure you’re not asking your name. You’re not asking your opening line. You’re not asking your statements. You are not asking your mission. You are STATING. And that is very contagious.” The research Van Edwards is perhaps referring to is a study published in 2015 by Xiaoming Jiang and Marc D. Pell at McGill University titled, “On how the brain decodes vocal cues about speaker confidence.” The way it worked was this: “We recorded listeners’ real-time brain responses while they evaluated statements wherein the speaker’s tone of voice conveyed one of three levels of confidence (confident, close-to-confident, unconfident) or were spoken in a neutral manner.” Do you sound confident? In a 2015 article for New Scientist, managing editor Penny Sarchet further explains how the tests were executed. They discovered their findings by “attaching 64 electrodes to the heads of volunteers and taking electroencephalograms (EEGs) while they listened to recorded statements. The statements – phrases like ‘they don’t drink alcohol’ – were spoken by actors or public speakers aiming to sound confident, nearly confident, unconfident or neutral. A different group of volunteers confirmed the confidence level of the recorded statements before the test subjects listened to them.” She helps sum up the findings. “So what makes us sound confident, or not? It’s hard to say. Jiang and Pell’s analyses revealed that confident voices were pretty similar acoustically to nearly-confident voices, but somehow prompted a different pattern of activity in listeners’ brains. Unconfident statements, on the other hand, tended to be higher in pitch and slower than all other expressions, as well as rising in pitch towards the end. Neutral statements were acoustically closer to confident ones, although they were lower in pitch, higher in intensity and spoken more rapidly.” The voice tells us so much Quoting Dr. Phil McAleer, a psychology and neuroscience professor at the University of Glasgow, UK, Sarchet adds, “People are rapidly waking up to the realisation that we obtain strong representations of perceived personality from a speaker’s voice.” The post Communication expert says we decide how ‘confident’ a person is in just 200 milliseconds appeared first on Upworthy.