Acoustic/prosodic and lexical correlates of charismatic speech

Charisma, the ability to command authority on the basis of personal qualities, is more difficult to define than to identify. How do charismatic leaders such as Fidel Castro or Pope John Paul II attract and retain their followers? We present results of an analysis of subjective ratings of charisma from a corpus of American political speech. We identify the associations between charisma ratings and ratings of other personal attributes. We also examine acoustic/prosodic and lexical features of this speech and correlate these with charisma ratings.