Our plenary speakers

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Love Humour

Three grand theories inevitably get referenced whenever anybody speaks or writes about humour: humour arises from feelings of superiority, or it is a release of tension, or it results from the perception of incongruity. I am interested in the possibility—seemingly raised by nobody in the two thousand years of philosophizing on humour, which says much more about philosophers than it says about anything else—that humour and laughter also can arise from love. My title is a double-entendre: we all love humour, and humour can be an expression of love. I will argue this by examining how humour arises and is represented in two controversial television programs about people with intellectual disabilities: Love on the Spectrum (2019; 2021) and Derek (2012-2014).

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Beautiful Voices and Powerful Voices: Where Attractiveness Ends and Charisma Begins

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Vocal attractiveness and vocal charisma are closely related in everyday perception, yet they represent fundamentally different social and communicative functions. While attractive voices are typically associated with pleasantness, likability, and aesthetic appeal, charismatic voices exert social influence: they are designed to mobilize attention, shape attitudes, and trigger followership. This keynote explores the shared nonverbal foundations and the crucial perceptual and functional boundaries between these two  related  concepts.

Drawing on recent perception research on vocal and facial attractiveness as well as large-scale studies on vocal charisma, the talk demonstrates that both constructs rely on partially overlapping acoustic cues, such as pitch level, spectral balance, breathiness, and speaking rate. At the same time, their weighting differs systematically. Attractive voices benefit from smoothness, symmetry, and acoustic “comfort,” whereas charismatic voices are characterized by dynamic prosodic modulation and rhythmical structuring, increased vocal and articulatory effort, and temporal variability.

Perceptual data further show that attractiveness is primarily driven by the face when visual information is available, while judgments of sympathy, personality, and social impact are dominated by the voice. Charisma, in contrast to attractiveness, remains highly voice-driven even in audiovisual contexts and shows stronger links to behavioral outcomes such as persuasion, trust, sales, and leadership attribution.

Understanding where attractiveness ends and charisma begins allows us to move from making voices sound pleasant to making voices socially effective — in terms of both programming machines and training human speakers.