Faces can provide vital clues about a person’s mood, but the most reliable way to ‘’read’’ someone may simply be to listen to them.
Yale psychologist Michael Kraus tested the ability to evaluate someone’s emotional state using different types of sensory information.
The experiments determined that voice-only interactions led to more accurate perceptions than visual-only or multisensory versions.
One reason is that faces can be misleading: while we sometimes hide our emotions by feigning a smile or a straight face, the cues contained in our voices may be harder to mask.