I’ll be giving away some speechwriting secrets today.  In particular, how to create a mood with your words.  It’s not just about meaning.  Or even body language.

A team of psychologists and phoneticists based in Germany has tested the effects that vowel sounds have on our moods.  And it turns out that “I” sounds (“hi”) generate positive moods and “O” sounds (“oh-no”) generate negative ones.

So far so good – and straightforward enough.  The implication is that you can create a positive mood by using a lot of the former sounds and a negative mood with a lot of the latter.

But the researchers kept going, and the further results are a bit more complicated.  It turns out that the way we screw up our faces when we make “I” sounds or “O” sounds also creates the same positive and negative moods.

So whether or not you’re making any sound, your facial expressions help determine your moods, and your reaction to things.  Of course, we think it’s the other way around, because we don’t like to imagine that our bodies are in charge of our thoughts, but that’s what the neuroscience shows.

Speakers who want to induce positive or negative moods in their audiences should use plenty of I or O sounds accordingly.  Or they could just get their audiences chanting I or O sounds, so that their facial muscles induce the same feelings.

The point is that you need to be sensitive to the sounds you’re making when you’re telling a story or relating some key points in your speech.  Use I sounds if you want audiences to react positively, and O sounds if you want the reverse.

And if you want your audience to feel really great, get them chanting something like, “Yes, I can!.”

Once again, the research reminds us of the importance of body language in the creation of emotion and attitude.  Body language both helps determine emotion and signals to us what we’re feeling.  So speakers need to become aware of their own body language to ensure that it’s sending out the desired messages – and watch the body language of the audience to see how the speaker is coming across.

The complicated and mysterious dance of human emotion and its physical expression is gradually revealing itself to neuroscientists.  It’s a wonderful time to be a speaker – we’re getting new ways to think about speaker and new ways to optimize our relationships with audiences – every day.