Análise perceptiva da empatia na fala de teleoperadores de emergências

Abstract

Introduction: emergency telemarketers correspond to a group of professionals who answer calls with different occurrences, mainly with content related to requests for help and crime reports. They works under a high level of stress, due to the long working hours and the high demand for calls associated with content with a high psycho-emotional impact. In the state of Paraíba, emergency operators have military training. Despite using a voice as their main working tool, these telemarketers do not receive training related to communication and voice. Thus, note that some factors are important in the performance of this professional group, such as empathy in meeting the demands of service users. Objective: to investigate through phonetic perceptual analysis the characteristics of empathy in the speech of telemarketers of an emergency call center in João Pessoa - PB. Methodology: observational, descriptive, documentary, cross-sectional, qualitative and quantitative study. The research corpus comprised samples of real calls from emergency teleoperators. Four speech samples were selected, two female and two male, belonging to a call recording bank provided by the emergency call center. These samples were edited, digitized and submitted to two perception experiments. The first was carried out by 113 lay judges, of both sexes, which consisted of a test with 5 pairs of antagonistic adjectives on a semantic differential scale to investigate the aspects of empathy in the speech of the four telemarketers. Then, the same samples were also analyzed through another experiment of perception of voice quality and dynamics by three experienced judges using the VPA-PB script. Such analysis proposed to compose the vocal profiles of the speakers who were judged empathic. Both perceptual data were submitted to quantitative and qualitative analyses. A regression was performed for analysis of numerical variables and one-way ANOVA for nominal variables. As well, the data obtained with the evaluation of the VPA-PB were submitted to the clustering analysis. Results: relationships between perceptual parameters of voice quality and dynamics with the impression of empathy were assessed. Two telemarketers (T1, T4) were found to be more empathetic, as they had lower averages in the perception test, being 18.68 (SD=18.20) and 40.76 (SD=27.51) respectively. Telemarketers T2 and T3 had the worst perception of speech empathy, with averages of 52.61 (SD=23.16) and 57.20 (SD=28.35). The general score of the adjective pairs showed a significant difference between the sexes of lay judges (F1, 111 = 7.059, p-value = 0.009), in which female lay judges presented a more negative perception than men regarding the empathy of speaks. The quality adjustments and non-neutral vocal dynamics elements verified in the samples of the four telemarketers comprised: increased habitual loudness, decreased lips extension, increased loudness variability, lowered tongue body, high habitual pitch, protracted jaw, decreased pitch extension , lowered larynx, vocal tract hyperfunction and pharyngeal constriction. Conclusions: when analyzing the data from the two perception modes, as relationship experiments, it is possible to verify that there are associations between what characterizes an empathic speech of an emergency telemarketer, due to its quality and dynamic elements of his voice with what is affected by its empathetic aspects.