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When listeners hear a voice, they rapidly form a complex first impression of who the person behind that voice might be. We characterize how these multivariate first impressions from voices emerge over time across different levels of abstraction using electroencephalography and representational similarity analysis. We find that for eight perceived physical (gender, age, and health), trait (attractiveness, dominance, and trustworthiness), and social characteristics (educatedness and professionalism), representations emerge early (~80 ms after stimulus onset), with voice acoustics contributing to those representations between ~100 ms and 400 ms. While impressions of person characteristics are highly correlated, we can find evidence for highly abstracted, independent representations of individual person characteristics. These abstracted representationse merge gradually over time. That is, representations of physical characteristics (age, gender) arise early (from ~120 ms), while representations of some trait and social characteristics emerge later (~360 ms onward). The findings align with recent theoretical models and shed light on the computations underpinning person perception from voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The voice is a variable and dynamic social tool with functional relevance for self-presentation, for example, during a job interview or courtship. Talkers adjust their voices flexibly to their situational or social environment. Here, we investigated how effectively intentional voice modulations can evoke trait impressions in listeners (Experiment 1), whether these trait impressions are recognizable (Experiment 2), and whether they meaningfully influence social interactions (Experiment 3). We recorded 40 healthy adult speakers' whilst speaking neutrally and whilst producing vocal expressions of six social traits (e.g., likeability, confidence). Multivariate ratings of 40 listeners showed that vocal modulations amplified specific trait percepts (Experiments 1 and 2), which could be explained by two principal components relating to perceived affiliation and competence. Moreover, vocal modulations increased the likelihood of listeners choosing the voice to be suitable for corresponding social goals (i.e., a confident rather than likeable voice to negotiate a promotion, Experiment 3). These results indicate that talkers modulate their voice along a common trait space for social navigation. Moreover, beyond reactive voice changes, vocal behaviour can be strategically used by talkers to communicate subtle information about themselves to listeners. These findings advance our understanding of non-verbal vocal behaviour for social communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We rarely become familiar with the voice of another person in isolation but usually also have access to visual identity information, thus learning to recognize their voice and face in parallel. There are conflicting findings as to whether learning to recognize voices in audiovisual vs audio‐only settings is advantageous or detrimental to learning. One prominent finding shows that the presence of a face overshadows the voice, hindering voice identity learning by capturing listeners' attention (Face Overshadowing Effect; FOE). In the current study, we tested the proposal that the effect of audiovisual training on voice identity learning is driven by attentional processes. Participants learned to recognize voices through either audio‐only training (Audio‐Only) or through three versions of audiovisual training, where a face was presented alongside the voices. During audiovisual training, the faces were either looking at the camera (Direct Gaze), were looking to the side (Averted Gaze) or had closed eyes (No Gaze). We found a graded effect of gaze on voice identity learning: Voice identity recognition was most accurate after audio‐only training and least accurate after audiovisual training including direct gaze, constituting a FOE. While effect sizes were overall small, the magnitude of FOE was halved for the Averted and No Gaze conditions. With direct gaze being associated with increased attention capture compared to averted or no gaze, the current findings suggest that incidental attention capture at least partially underpins the FOE. We discuss these findings in light of visual dominance effects and the relative informativeness of faces vs voices for identity perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current study, we examine and compare the effects of talker and accent familiarity in the context of a voice identity sorting task, using naturally varying voice recording samples from the TV show Derry Girls. Voice samples were thus all spoken with a regional accent of UK/Irish English (from [London]derry). We tested four listener groups: Listeners were either familiar or unfamiliar with the TV show (and therefore the talker identities) and were either highly familiar or relatively less familiar with Northern Irish accents. Both talker and accent familiarity significantly improved accuracy of voice identity sorting performance. However, the talker familiarity benefits were overall larger, and more consistent. We discuss the results in light of a possible hierarchy of familiarity effects and argue that our findings may provide additional evidence for interactions of speech and identity processing pathways in voice identity perception. We also identify some key limitations in the current work and provide suggestions for future studies to address these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "ventriloquism effect" describes an illusory phenomenon where the perceived location of an auditory stimulus is pulled toward the location of a visual stimulus. Ventriloquists use this phenomenon to create an illusion where an inanimate puppet is perceived to speak. Ventriloquists use the expression and suppression of their own and the puppet's mouth movements as well the direction of their respective eye gaze to maximize the illusion. While the puppet's often exaggerated mouth movements have been demonstrated to enhance the ventriloquism effect, the contribution of direct eye gaze remains unknown. In Experiment 1, participants viewed an image of a person's face while hearing a temporally synchronous recording of a voice originating from different locations on the azimuthal plane. The eyes of the facial stimuli were either looking directly at participants or were closed. Participants were more likely to misperceive the location of a range of voice locations as coming from a central position when the eye gaze of the facial stimuli were directed toward them. Thus, direct gaze enhances the ventriloquist effect by attracting participants' perception of the voice locations toward the location of the face. In an exploratory analysis, we furthermore found no evidence for an other-race effect between White vs Asian listeners. In Experiment 2, we replicated the effect of direct eye gaze on the ventriloquism effect, also showing that faces per se attract perceived sound locations compared with audio-only sound localization. Showing a modulation of the ventriloquism effect by socially-salient eye gaze information thus adds to previous findings reporting top-down influences on this effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experimental findings for trait impressions from voices are often discussed in relation to potential evolutionary origins. This commentary takes Sutherland and Young's (2022) account of the different potential origins of facial trait impressions to suggest that vocal trait impressions should also be viewed as having been shaped by cultural and individual learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity perception often takes place in multimodal settings, where perceivers have access to both visual (face) and auditory (voice) information. Despite this, identity perception is usually studied in unimodal contexts, where face and voice identity perception are modelled independently from one another. In this study, we asked whether and how much auditory and visual information contribute to audiovisual identity perception from naturally‐varying stimuli. In a between‐subjects design, participants completed an identity sorting task with either dynamic video‐only, audio‐only or dynamic audiovisual stimuli. In this task, participants were asked to sort multiple, naturally‐varying stimuli from three different people by perceived identity. We found that identity perception was more accurate for video‐only and audiovisual stimuli compared with audio‐only stimuli. Interestingly, there was no difference in accuracy between video‐only and audiovisual stimuli. Auditory information nonetheless played a role alongside visual information as audiovisual identity judgements per stimulus could be predicted from both auditory and visual identity judgements, respectively. While the relationship was stronger for visual information and audiovisual information, auditory information still uniquely explained a significant portion of the variance in audiovisual identity judgements. Our findings thus align with previous theoretical and empirical work that proposes that, compared with faces, voices are an important but relatively less salient and a weaker cue to identity perception. We expand on this work to show that, at least in the context of this study, having access to voices in addition to faces does not result in better identity perception accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unimodal and cross-modal information provided by faces and voices contribute to identity percepts. To examine how these sources of information interact, we devised a novel audio-visual sorting task in which participants were required to group video-only and audio-only clips into two identities. In a series of three experiments, we show that unimodal face and voice sorting were more accurate than cross-modal sorting: While face sorting was consistently most accurate followed by voice sorting, cross-modal sorting was at chancel level or below. In Experiment 1, we compared performance in our novel audio-visual sorting task to a traditional identity matching task, showing that unimodal and cross-modal identity perception were overall moderately more accurate than the traditional identity matching task. In Experiment 2, separating unimodal from cross-modal sorting led to small improvements in accuracy for unimodal sorting, but no change in cross-modal sorting performance. In Experiment 3, we explored the effect of minimal audio-visual training: Participants were shown a clip of the two identities in conversation prior to completing the sorting task. This led to small, nonsignificant improvements in accuracy for unimodal and cross-modal sorting. Our results indicate that unfamiliar face and voice perception operate relatively independently with no evidence of mutual benefit, suggesting that extracting reliable cross-modal identity information is challenging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans have a remarkable capacity to finely control the muscles of the larynx, via distinct patterns of cortical topography and innervation that may underpin our sophisticated vocal capabilities compared with nonhuman primates. Here, we investigated the behavioural and neural correlates of laryngeal control, and their relationship to vocal expertise, using an imitation task that required adjustments of larynx musculature during speech. Highly trained human singers and non-singer control participants modulated voice pitch and vocal tract length (VTL) to mimic auditory speech targets, while undergoing real-time anatomical scans of the vocal tract and functional scans of brain activity. Multivariate analyses of speech acoustics, larynx movements and brain activation datawere used to quantify vocal modulation behaviour and to search for neural representations of the two modulated vocal parameters during the preparation and execution of speech. We found that singers showed more accurate task-relevant modulations of speech pitch and VTL (i.e. larynx height, as measured with vocal tract MRI) during speech imitation; this was accompanied by stronger representation of VTL within a region of the right somatosensory cortex. Our findings suggest a common neural basis for enhanced vocal control in speech and song. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on within-individual modulation of vocal cues is surprisingly scarce outside of human speech. Yet, voice modulation serves diverse functions in human and nonhuman nonverbal communication, from dynamically signalling motivation and emotion, to exaggerating physical traits such as body size and masculinity, to enabling song and musicality. The diversity of anatomical, neural, cognitive and behavioural adaptations necessary for the production and perception of voice modulation make it a critical target for research on the origins and functions of acoustic communication. This diversity also implicates voice modulation in numerous disciplines and technological applications. In this two-part theme issue comprising 21 articles from leading and emerging international researchers, we highlight the multidisciplinary nature of the voice sciences. Every article addresses at least two, if not several, critical topics: (i) development and mechanisms driving vocal control and modulation; (ii) cultural and other environmental factors affecting voice modulation; (iii) evolutionary origins and adaptive functions of vocal control including cross-species comparisons; (iv) social functions and real-world consequences of voice modulation; and (v) state-of-the-art in multidisciplinary methodologies and technologies in voice modulation research. With this collection of works, we aim to facilitate cross-talk across disciplines to further stimulate the burgeoning field of voice modulation. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When presented with voices, we make rapid, automatic judgements of social traits such as trustworthiness—and such judgements are highly consistent across listeners. However, it remains unclear whether voice-based first impressions actually influence behaviour towards a voice's owner, and—if they do—whether and how they interact over time with the voice owner's observed actions to further influence the listener's behaviour. This study used an investment game paradigm to investigate (1) whether voices judged to differ in relevant social traits accrued different levels of investment and/or (2) whether first impressions of the voices interacted with the behaviour of their apparent owners to influence investments over time. Results show that participants were responding to their partner's behaviour. Crucially, however, there were no effects of voice. These findings suggest that, at least under some conditions, social traits perceived from the voice alone may not influence trusting behaviours in the context of a virtual interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information associated with the self is prioritized relative to information associated with others and is therefore processed more quickly and accurately. Across three experiments, we examined whether a new externally‐generated voice could become associated with the self and thus be prioritized in perception. In the first experiment, participants learned associations between three unfamiliar voices and three identities (self, friend, stranger). Participants then made speeded judgements of whether voice‐identity pairs were correctly matched, or not. A clear self‐prioritization effect was found, with participants showing quicker and more accurate responses to the newly self‐associated voice relative to either the friend‐ or stranger‐ voice. In two further experiments, we tested whether this prioritization effect increased if the self‐voice was gender‐matched to the identity of the participant (Experiment 2) or if the self‐voice was chosen by the participant (Experiment 3). Gender‐matching did not significantly influence prioritization; the self‐voice was similarly prioritized when it matched the gender identity of the listener as when it did not. However, we observed that choosing the self‐voice did interact with prioritization (Experiment 3); the self‐voice became more prominent, via lesser prioritization of the other identities, when the self‐voice was chosen relative to when it was not. Our findings have implications for the design and selection of individuated synthetic voices used for assistive communication devices, suggesting that agency in choosing a new vocal identity may modulate the distinctiveness of that voice relative to others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have shown that face-voice matching accuracy is more consistently above chance for dynamic (i.e. speaking) faces than for static faces. This suggests that dynamic information can play an important role in informing matching decisions. We initially asked whether this advantage for dynamic stimuli is due to shared information across modalities that is encoded in articulatory mouth movements. Participants completed a sequential face-voice matching task with (1) static images of faces, (2) dynamic videos of faces, (3) dynamic videos where only the mouth was visible, and (4) dynamic videos where the mouth was occluded, in a well-controlled stimulus set. Surprisingly, after accounting for random variation in the data due to design choices, accuracy for all four conditions was at chance. Crucially, however, exploratory analyses revealed that participants were not responding randomly, with different patterns of response biases being apparent for different conditions. Our findings suggest that face-voice identity matching may not be possible with above-chance accuracy but that analyses of response biases can shed light upon how people attempt face-voice matching. We discuss these findings with reference to the differential functional roles for faces and voices recently proposed for multimodal person perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From only a single spoken word, listeners can form a wealth of first impressions of a person's character traits and personality based on their voice. However, due to the substantial within‐person variability in voices, these trait judgements are likely to be highly stimulus‐dependent for unfamiliar voices: The same person may sound very trustworthy in one recording but less trustworthy in another. How trait judgements differ when listeners are familiar with a voice is unclear: Are listeners who are familiar with the voices as susceptible to the effects of within‐person variability? Does the semantic knowledge listeners have about a familiar person influence their judgements? In the current study, we tested the effect of familiarity on listeners' trait judgements from variable voices across 3 experiments. Using a between‐subjects design, we contrasted trait judgements by listeners who were familiar with a set of voices – either through laboratory‐based training or through watching a TV show – with listeners who were unfamiliar with the voices. We predicted that familiarity with the voices would reduce variability in trait judgements for variable voice recordings from the same identity (cf. Mileva, Kramer & Burton, Perception, 48, 471 and 2019, for faces). However, across the 3 studies and two types of measures to assess variability, we found no compelling evidence to suggest that trait impressions were systematically affected by familiarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity sorting tasks, in which participants sort multiple naturally varying stimuli of usually two identities into perceived identities, have recently gained popularity in voice and face processing research. In both modalities, participants who are unfamiliar with the identities tend to perceive multiple stimuli of the same identity as different people and thus fail to "tell people together." These similarities across modalities suggest that modality-general mechanisms may underpin sorting behaviour. In this study, participants completed a voice sorting and a face sorting task. Taking an individual differences approach, we asked whether participants' performance on voice and face sorting of unfamiliar identities is correlated. Participants additionally completed a voice discrimination (Bangor Voice Matching Test) and a face discrimination task (Glasgow Face Matching Test). Using these tasks, we tested whether performance on sorting related to explicit identity discrimination. Performance on voice sorting and face sorting tasks was correlated, suggesting that common modality-general processes underpin these tasks. However, no significant correlations were found between sorting and discrimination performance, with the exception of significant relationships for performance on "same identity" trials with "telling people together" for voices and faces. Overall, any reported relationships were however relatively weak, suggesting the presence of additional modality-specific and task-specific processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the effects of two types of task instructions on performance on a voice sorting task by listeners who were either familiar or unfamiliar with the voices. Listeners were asked to sort 15 naturally varying stimuli from two voice identities into perceived identities. Half of the listeners sorted the recordings freely into as many identities as they perceived; the other half were forced to sort stimuli into two identities only. As reported in previous studies, unfamiliar listeners formed more clusters than familiar listeners. Listeners therefore perceived different naturally varying stimuli from the same identity as coming from different identities, while being highly accurate at telling apart the stimuli from different voices. We further show that a change in task instructions – forcing listeners to sort stimuli into two identities only – helped unfamiliar listeners to overcome this selective failure at 'telling people together'. This improvement, however, came at the cost of an increase in errors in telling people apart. For familiar listeners, similar non‐significant trends were apparent. Therefore, even when informed about correct number of identities, listeners may fail to accurately perceive identity further highlighting that voice identity perception in the context of natural within‐person variability is a challenging task. We discuss our results in terms of similarities and differences to findings in the face perception literature and their importance in applied settings, such as forensic voice identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an investigation of the perception of authenticity in audiovisual laughter, in which we contrast spontaneous and volitional samples and examine the contributions of unimodal affective information to multimodal percepts. In a pilot study, we demonstrate that listeners perceive spontaneous laughs as more authentic than volitional ones, both in unimodal (audio-only, visual-only) and multimodal contexts (audiovisual). In the main experiment, we show that the discriminability of volitional and spontaneous laughter is enhanced for multimodal laughter. Analyses of relationships between affective ratings and the perception of authenticity show that, while both unimodal percepts significantly predict evaluations of audiovisual laughter, it is auditory affective cues that have the greater influence on multimodal percepts. We discuss differences and potential mismatches in emotion signalling through voices and faces, in the context of spontaneous and volitional behaviour, and highlight issues that should be addressed in future studies of dynamic multimodal emotion processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human voice is a highly flexible instrument for self-expression, yet voice identity perception is largely studied using controlled speech recordings. Using two voice-sorting tasks with naturally varying stimuli, we compared the performance of listeners who were familiar and unfamiliar with the TV show Breaking Bad. Listeners organised audio clips of speech with (1) low-expressiveness and (2) high-expressiveness into perceived identities. We predicted that increased expressiveness (e.g., shouting, strained voice) would significantly impair performance. Overall, while unfamiliar listeners were less able to generalise identity across exemplars, the two groups performed equivalently well when telling voices apart when dealing with low-expressiveness stimuli. However, high vocal expressiveness significantly impaired telling apart in both the groups: this led to increased misidentifications, where sounds from one character were assigned to the other. These misidentifications were highly consistent for familiar listeners but less consistent for unfamiliar listeners. Our data suggest that vocal flexibility has powerful effects on identity perception, where changes in the acoustic properties of vocal signals introduced by expressiveness lead to effects apparent in familiar and unfamiliar listeners alike. At the same time, expressiveness appears to have affected other aspects of voice identity processing selectively in one listener group but not the other, thus revealing complex interactions of stimulus properties and listener characteristics (i.e., familiarity) in identity processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our voices sound different depending on the context (laughing vs. talking to a child vs. giving a speech), making within‐person variability an inherent feature of human voices. When perceiving speaker identities, listeners therefore need to not only 'tell people apart' (perceiving exemplars from two different speakers as separate identities) but also 'tell people together' (perceiving different exemplars from the same speaker as a single identity). In the current study, we investigated how such natural within‐person variability affects voice identity perception. Using voices from a popular TV show, listeners, who were either familiar or unfamiliar with this show, sorted naturally varying voice clips from two speakers into clusters to represent perceived identities. Across three independent participant samples, unfamiliar listeners perceived more identities than familiar listeners and frequently mistook exemplars from the same speaker to be different identities. These findings point towards a selective failure in 'telling people together'. Our study highlights within‐person variability as a key feature of voices that has striking effects on (unfamiliar) voice identity perception. Our findings not only open up a new line of enquiry in the field of voice perception but also call for a re‐evaluation of theoretical models to account for natural variability during identity perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two experiments, we explore how speaker sex recognition is affected by vocal flexibility, introduced by volitional and spontaneous vocalizations. In Experiment 1, participants judged speaker sex from two spontaneous vocalizations, laughter and crying, and volitionally produced vowels. Striking effects of speaker sex emerged: For male vocalizations, listeners' performance was significantly impaired for spontaneous vocalizations (laughter and crying) compared to a volitional baseline (repeated vowels), a pattern that was also reflected in longer reaction times for spontaneous vocalizations. Further, performance was less accurate for laughter than crying. For female vocalizations, a different pattern emerged. In Experiment 2, we largely replicated the findings of Experiment 1 using spontaneous laughter, volitional laughter and (volitional) vowels: here, performance for male vocalizations was impaired for spontaneous laughter compared to both volitional laughter and vowels, providing further evidence that differences in volitional control over vocal production may modulate our ability to accurately perceive speaker sex from vocal signals. For both experiments, acoustic analyses showed relationships between stimulus fundamental frequency (F0) and the participants' responses. The higher the F0 of a vocal signal, the more likely listeners were to perceive a vocalization as being produced by a female speaker, an effect that was more pronounced for vocalizations produced by males. We discuss the results in terms of the availability of salient acoustic cues across different vocalizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human voices are extremely variable: The same person can sound very different depending on whether they are speaking, laughing, shouting or whispering. In order to successfully recognise someone from their voice, a listener needs to be able to generalize across these different vocal signals ('telling people together'). However, in most studies of voice-identity processing to date, the substantial within-person variability has been eliminated through the use of highly controlled stimuli, thus focussing on how we tell people apart. We argue that this obscures our understanding of voice-identity processing by controlling away an essential feature of vocal stimuli that may include diagnostic information. In this paper, we propose that we need to extend the focus of voice-identity research to account for both "telling people together" as well as "telling people apart." That is, we must account for whether, and to what extent, listeners can overcome within-person variability to obtain a stable percept of person identity from vocal cues. To do this, our theoretical and methodological frameworks need to be adjusted to explicitly include the study of within-person variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on several psychological aspects related to laughter including acoustics, perception, and authenticity. Topics discussed include use of multiple regression analysis for measuring acoustic properties of laughter, phonatory features affecting neural senses, and importance of laughter in human communication.

When talkers speak in masking sounds, their speech undergoes a variety of acoustic and phonetic changes. These changes are known collectively as the Lombard effect. Most behavioural research and neuroimaging research in this area has concentrated on the effect of energetic maskers such as white noise on Lombard speech. Previous fMRI studies have argued that neural responses to speaking in noise are driven by the quality of auditory feedback--that is, the audibility of the speaker's voice over the masker. However, we also frequently produce speech in the presence of informational maskers such as another talker. Here, speakers read sentences over a range of maskers varying in their informational and energetic content: speech, rotated speech, speech modulated noise, and white noise. Subjects also spoke in quiet and listened to the maskers without speaking. When subjects spoke in masking sounds, their vocal intensity increased in line with the energetic content of the masker. However, the opposite pattern was found neurally. In the superior temporal gyrus, activation was most strongly associated with increases in informational, rather than energetic, masking. This suggests that the neural activations associated with speaking in noise are more complex than a simple feedback response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synchronized behavior (chanting, singing, praying, dancing) is found in all human cultures and is central to religious, military, and political activities, which require people to act collaboratively and cohesively; however, we know little about the neural underpinnings of many kinds of synchronous behavior (e.g., vocal behavior) or its role in establishing and maintaining group cohesion. In the present study, we measured neural activity using fMRI while participants spoke simultaneously with another person. We manipulated whether the couple spoke the same sentence (allowing synchrony) or different sentences (preventing synchrony), and also whether the voice the participant heard was "live" (allowing rich reciprocal interaction) or prerecorded (with no such mutual influence). Synchronous speech was associated with increased activity in posterior and anterior auditory fields. When, and only when, participants spoke with a partner who was both synchronous and "live," we observed a lack of the suppression of auditory cortex, which is commonly seen as a neural correlate of speech production. Instead, auditory cortex responded as though it were processing another talker's speech. Our results suggest that detecting synchrony leads to a change in the perceptual consequences of one'sownactions: they are processed as though they were other-, rather than self-produced. This may contribute to our understanding of synchronized behavior as a group-bonding tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that categorising the emotional content of facial expressions may differ depending on contextual information. Whether this malleability is observed in the auditory domain and in genuine emotion expressions is poorly explored. We examined the perception of authentic laughter and crying in the context of happy, neutral and sad facial expressions. Participants rated the vocalisations on separate unipolar scales of happiness and sadness and on arousal. Although they were instructed to focus exclusively on the vocalisations, consistent context effects were found: For both laughter and crying, emotion judgements were shifted towards the information expressed by the face. These modulations were independent of response latencies and were larger for more emotionally ambiguous vocalisations. No effects of context were found for arousal ratings. These findings suggest that the automatic encoding of contextual information during emotion perception generalises across modalities, to purely non-verbal vocalisations, and is not confined to acted expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on a study about vocal emotions and communication, highlighting several significant signals which are considered crucial for a complete understanding of vocal emotions including nonverbal vocalizations which include laughter, sobs, and screams. Information concerning various steps in the processing of vocal emotions is presented. Details about bilateral auditory cortices as well as neuroimaging data are mentioned.

Models of voice perception propose that identities are encoded relative to an abstracted average or prototype. While there is some evidence for norm-based coding when learning to discriminate different voices, little is known about how the representation of an individual's voice identity is formed through variable exposure to that voice. In two experiments, we show evidence that participants form abstracted representations of individual voice identities based on averages, despite having never been exposed to these averages during learning. We created 3 perceptually distinct voice identities, fully controlling their within-person variability. Listeners first learned to recognise these identities based on ring-shaped distributions located around the perimeter of within-person voice spaces – crucially, these distributions were missing their centres. At test, listeners' accuracy for old/new judgements was higher for stimuli located on an untrained distribution nested around the centre of each ring-shaped distribution compared to stimuli on the trained ring-shaped distribution. People can learn to identify a person based on their voice, despite variation in their voice. Here, the authors show that this ability relies on a statistical abstraction mechanism during which people form average-based representations of voices, even without prior exposure to the average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Misalignment between second language (L2) self-perception and actual ability is often observed among L2 learners. In order to further understand this phenomenon, the current study investigated how the roles of individual differences (IDs; especially experiential and cognitive IDs) influence the learners' self-assessment accuracy. To this end, L2 speech samples elicited from 97 Japanese learners of English were analyzed via self-evaluation and expert evaluations. Subsequently, learners' IDs profiles, including working memory, phonological memory, implicit learning and auditory processing, were linked to (a) the gap between self- and expert evaluation scores and (b) the type of inaccurate self-evaluation (i.e., overconfident vs. underconfident evaluations). The study illustrates the complex relationships between L2 learners' linguistic knowledge, cognitive abilities, experiential profiles and self-perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the use of the voice by five Black opera and musical theatre performers. The performers discuss the approaches that they take in the representation of music that requires integrated vocality, which amalgamates elements from Western classical vocalism and stylistic genres of traditionally Black forms like gospel, jazz, and blues. Data were collected through audio/visual analysis, interviews, and video stimulated recall. The emergent theme explored is as follows: A singer positions themself at the nexus of their cultural legacy as a learner, exemplar, advocate, and transmitter of culture. A Black singer consciously uses musical strategies when presenting and re-presenting music based in culturally affirming aesthetics. The artist becomes skilled at executing Black vocal aesthetics to encourage other artists and to perpetuate Black culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing managerial interest in frontline employee behavior, and in display authenticity specifically, customers' heterogeneous reactions to authentic displays have received little scholarly attention. Drawing on emotion as social information theory, we investigate the role of motivational orientations (i.e., regulatory focus) in customer reactions to authentic displays. The findings show that inauthentic displays have stronger negative effects on service performance for prevention-focused than for promotion-focused customers. A dyadic field study details these effects in terms of tipping, and three experiments provide further evidence by experimentally manipulating authenticity and regulatory focus. The conditional effect of authenticity on service performance also is mediated by inferred deception. Specifically, prevention-focused customers interpret inauthentic emotion displays as more deceptive than promotion-focused customers do. Managers should prime customers' promotion focus using marketing communications before the service delivery when inauthentic displays are likely as well as consider customers' regulatory focus when designing authenticity training for employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vocal imitation guides both music and language development. Despite the developmental significance of this behavior, a sizable minority of individuals are inaccurate at vocal pitch imitation. Although previous research suggested that inaccurate pitch imitation results from deficient sensorimotor associations between pitch perception and vocal motor planning, the cognitive processes involved in sensorimotor translation are not clearly defined. In the present research, we investigated the roles of basic cognitive processes in the vocal imitation of pitch, as well as the degree to which these processes rely on pitch-specific resources. In the present study, participants completed a battery of pitch and verbal tasks to measure pitch perception, pitch and verbal auditory imagery, pitch and verbal auditory short-term memory, and pitch imitation ability. Information on participants' music background was collected, as well. Pitch imagery, pitch short-term memory, pitch discrimination ability, and musical experience were unique predictors of pitch imitation ability. Furthermore, pitch imagery was a partial mediator of the relationship between pitch short-term memory and pitch imitation ability. These results indicate that vocal imitation recruits cognitive processes that rely on at least partially separate neural resources for pitch and verbal representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a list of individuals who served as expert referees on submitted papers between September 1, 2017 and August 31, 2018 for magazine including Elger Abrahamse and Richard Allen.

Cattle mother-offspring contact calls encode individual-identity information; however, it is unknown whether cattle are able to maintain individuality when vocalising to familiar conspecifics over other positively and negatively valenced farming contexts. Accordingly, we recorded 333 high-frequency vocalisations from 13 Holstein-Friesian heifers during oestrus and anticipation of feed (putatively positive), as well as denied feed access and upon both physical and physical & visual isolation from conspecifics (putatively negative). We measured 21 source-related and nonlinear vocal parameters and stepwise discriminant function analyses (DFA) were performed. Calls were divided into positive (n = 170) and negative valence (n = 163) with each valence acting as a 'training set' to classify calls in the oppositely valenced 'test set'. Furthermore, MANOVAs were conducted to determine which vocal parameters were implicated in individual distinctiveness. Within the putatively positive 'training set', the cross-validated DFA correctly classified 68.2% of the putatively positive calls and 52.1% of the putatively negative calls to the correct individual, respectively. Within the putatively negative 'training set', the cross-validated DFA correctly assigned 60.1% of putatively negative calls and 49.4% of putatively positive calls to the correct individual, respectively. All DFAs exceeded chance expectations indicating that vocal individuality of high-frequency calls is maintained across putatively positive and negative valence, with all vocal parameters except subharmonics responsible for this individual distinctiveness. This study shows that cattle vocal individuality of high-frequency calls is stable across different emotionally loaded farming contexts. Individual distinctiveness is likely to attract social support from conspecifics, and knowledge of these individuality cues could assist farmers in detecting individual cattle for welfare or production purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]