Covert digital manipulation of vocal emotion alter speakers’ emotional states in a congruent direction

Abstract

Research has shown that people often exert control over their emotions. By modulating expressions, reappraising feelings, and redirecting attention, they can regulate their emotional experience. These findings have contributed to a blurring of the traditional boundaries between cognitive and emotional processes, and it has been suggested that emotional signals are produced in a goaldirected way and monitored for errors like other intentional actions. However, this interesting possibility has never been experimentally tested. To this end, we created a digital audio platform to covertly modify the emotional tone of participants' voices while they talked in the direction of happiness, sadness, or fear. The result showed that the audio transformations were being perceived as natural examples of the intended emotions, but the great majority of the participants, nevertheless, remained unaware that their own voices were being manipulated. This finding indicates that people are not continuously monitoring their own voice to make sure that it meets a predetermined emotional target. Instead, as a consequence of listening to their altered voices, the emotional state of the participants changed in congruence with the emotion portrayed, which was measured by both self-report and skin conductance level. This change is the first evidence, to our knowledge, of peripheral feedback effects on emotional experience in the auditory domain. As such, our result reinforces the wider framework of self-perception theory: that we often use the same inferential strategies to understand ourselves as those that we use to understand others. emotion monitoring | vocal feedback | self-perception | digital audio effects | voice emotion

Regulating Feelings During Interpersonal Conflicts by Changing Voice Self-perception

“…In order to change how a user perceives their voice, we used software that can manipulate a sound captured through a microphone and play back via headphone in less than 20 milliseconds [55]. Since the delay is minimum, the person attributes the sound that she hears through the headphone as her own voice [5]. With this approach, users should focus on their conversations without moving their attention away to the technology.…”

“…These values for voice modulation were used because in a previous study it was found that they lead to a perception of low arousal and calmness [5].…”

“…When individuals speak with voice tones that resemble expressions of emotions, they tend to have congruent emotional experiences [31] [5]. For instance, when producing sound patterns of joy, people tend to feel happier [31].…”

“…According to self-perception theory [6] "individuals come to 'know' their own attitudes, emotions, and other internal states partially by inferring them from observations of their own overt behavior and/or circumstances in which this behavior occurs". Indeed, studies indicate that when individuals produce sound patterns associated with emotions such as joy, sadness and anger, they tend to have congruent emotional experiences [31] [5]. For instance, when producing sounds of laughter, people tend to feel happier than when producing other emotional sounds [31].…”

Affective Prosody and Depression After Stroke

“…A recent study demonstrated that hearing one's own voice influences one's own mood, 15 suggesting that early deterioration of affective prosody could, therefore, negatively influence patients' mood. Fundamental frequency variation is known to be more useful for tracking within-patient changes than interindividual differences.…”