From Joyous to Clinically Depressed: Mood Detection Using Spontaneous Speech

Depression and other mood disorders are common and disabling disorders. We present work towards an objective diagnostic aid supporting clinicians using affective sensing technology with a focus on acoustic and statistical features from spontaneous speech. This work investigates differences in expressing positive and negative emotions in depressed and healthy control subjects as well as whether initial gender classification increases the recognition rate. To this end, spontaneous speech from interviews of 30 subjects of each depressed and controls was analysed, with a focus on questions eliciting positive and negative emotions. Using HMMs with GMMs for classification with 30-fold cross-validation, we found that MFCC, energy and intensity features gave highest recognition rates when female and male subjects were analysed together. When the dataset was first split by gender, root mean square energy and shimmer features, respectively, were found to give the highest recognition rates in females, while it was voice quality for males. Overall, correct recognition rates from acoustic features for depressed female subjects were higher than for male subjects. Using temporal features, we found that the response time and average syllable duration were longer in depressed subjects, while the interaction involvement and articulation rate wesre higher in control subjects.

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