The sound of emergency: The role of vocal cues in healthcare

A considerable body of research has explored how first impressions from voices influence social decisions, demonstrating the significance of perceived emotional and social traits alongside acoustic parameters across various contexts, including elections, legal decisions, and economic or mating-related choices. In a novel ecological context, specifically healthcare emergency dispatch, where trained nurses respond to critical health situations, we investigated whether caller voice characteristics (e.g., acoustic parameters, gender, emotional valence and arousal, social trait attributions) is related to healthcare professionals' prioritization decisions beyond available clinical information. We selected cases when the call-taker deviated from an algorithm, changing the proposed priority, to understand which factors may bias their decision. We dissociated acoustic-phonetic features from semantic content by manipulating stimuli across different experimental samples, comprised of Italian and American participants. Judgments of emotional traits (valence and arousal) and social traits (perceived trustworthiness, dominance, familiarity, and attractiveness) were collected from all participants while listening brief excerpts (mean audio length of 3 s) from original call recordings. Critically, we found that social attributions of dominance and attractiveness, arousal and valence ratings, as well as control variables such as voice gender, pitch, harmonic-to-noise ratio (HNR), and COVID-19 related pathologies, were significantly associated with instances where call-takers made wrong decisions by either overestimating or underestimating care priority.