title: 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 goal-directed 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.
authors.affiliation: Science and Technology of Music and Sound (STMS UMR9912), CNRS/Institut de Recherche et Coordination en Acoustique et Musique (IRCAM)/Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC), 74005 Paris, France; aucouturier@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Jean-Julien
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4477-4812
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Aucouturier
authors.affiliation: Lund University Cognitive Science, Lund University, 221 00 Lund, Sweden; Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala University, 752 38 Uppsala, Sweden;
authors.forename: Petter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Johansson
authors.affiliation: Lund University Cognitive Science, Lund University, 221 00 Lund, Sweden;
authors.forename: Lars
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Hall
authors.affiliation: Siemens Healthcare, 141-8644 Tokyo, Japan; Communication Science Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) Corporation, 243-0198 Kanagawa, Japan;
authors.forename: Rodrigo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Segnini
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire d'Etude de l'Apprentissage et du Développement (LEAD UMR5022), CNRS/Université de Bourgogne, 21000 Dijon, France;
authors.forename: Lolita
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Mercadié
authors.affiliation: Department of Intermedia Art and Science, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University, 169-8555 Tokyo, Japan; Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo, 153 8904 Tokyo, Japan.
authors.forename: Katsumi
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Watanabe
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000368:Aged; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D012649:Self Concept; D014831:Voice
keywords: digital audio effects; emotion monitoring; self-perception; vocal feedback; voice emotion