Publication Name	World Journal of Psychiatry
Manuscript ID	113646
Country	Austria

Category	Multidisciplinary Sciences
Manuscript Type	Retrospective Study
Article Title	Voice as the sound of the psyche: Changes in prosodic characteristics in depressive patients in long-term therapy
Manuscript Source	Invited Manuscript
All Author List	Christoph Holzweber, Beate Hennenberg, Laurenz Stastka, Malte Kob and Henriette Löffler-Stastka
Funding Agency and Grant Number
Corresponding Author	Henriette Löffler-Stastka, Dean, Director, MD, PhD, Department of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Medical University Vienna, Währinger Gürtel 18-20, Vienna 1090, Austria. henriette.loeffler-stastka@meduniwien.ac.at
Key Words	Voice; Depression; Fundamental frequency; Emotional state
Core Tip	Voice is a central component in interacting with the world and a major factor in defining the relationship between patient and therapist. The complex system enabling us to produce a vocal tone is influenced by several physiological components and transports information about our feelings and emotions. Especially for patients with depression the voice is often described as muted and monotone. This research initially provides theoretical background and then focuses on the evolution and change of the fundamental vocal frequency of patients with depression during long lasting psychotherapy. Therefore, a method was created to identify the fundamental frequency of sequences of sessions recorded within the Munich psychotherapy study and applied throughout sessions of 25 individual patients. The phonetic analyses were performed using appropriate phonetic software. The output of the analysis is crosschecked with the output parameters [Beck depression inventory (BDI) for depression] and converted into a formula to calculate a ratio between fundamental frequency and BDI rating scores. Results are shown on an individual basis for specific patients and evaluated for the overall scope and in an overall context.
Citation	Holzweber C, Hennenberg B, Stastka L, Kob M, Löffler-Stastka H. Voice as the sound of the psyche: Changes in prosodic characteristics in depressive patients in long-term therapy. World J Psychiatry 2025; In press

Received	2025-09-01 07:08
Peer-Review Started	2025-09-01 07:08
To Make the First Decision
Return for Revision	2025-09-23 06:20
Revised	2025-10-06 10:19
Second Decision	2025-11-24 02:42
Accepted by Journal Editor-in-Chief
Accepted by Executive Editor-in-Chief	2025-11-24 06:21
Articles in Press	2025-11-24 06:21
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ISSN	2220-3206 (online)
Open Access	This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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