A person's suitability for many activities is manifest and made evident more in a sample of the person's spontaneous verbal and other voluntary behavior than in any traditional written document such as a resume or a certificate of educational or vocational qualification. For many social and commercial roles, a spontaneous positive outlook, an appropriate level of energy, and coherent, considerate spoken communication are key behavior elements that interviewers look for. Embodiments disclosed include improved systems and methods of extracting sentiment and estimating affect from speech-borne features, by capturing and incorporating other, non-speech, voluntary actions in response to a set of performance tasks and combining these non-speech parameter values with the content and manner of verbal behavior to produce more accurate estimates of expected human reaction to the performance samples within a given performance period and to derive accurate estimates from smaller intervals of a person's performance.
