How to make a good impression when saying hello

You can hear the perfect hello. And now you can see it too. Researchers from the CNRS, the ENS, and Aix-Marseille University¹ have established an experimental method that unveils the filter—that is, mental representation—we use to judge people when hearing them say a word as simple as “hello”. What is the ideal intonation for coming across as determined or trustworthy? This method is already used by these researchers for clinical purposes, with stroke survivors, and it opens many new doors for the study of language perception. The team's findings are published in PNAS (March 26, 2018). When people you meet for the first time say hello, do they strike you as friendly or hostile? The linguistic and social judgments we make when hearing speech are based on intonation. Just as we have a mental image of what an apple looks like—round, green or red, with a stem, etc.—we form mental representations of others' personalities according to the acoustic qualities of their voices.