Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QB, UK.
Cereb Cortex. 2012 Jun;22(6):1263-70. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhr204. Epub 2011 Aug 9.
Social interactions involve more than "just" language. As important is a more primitive nonlinguistic mode of communication acting in parallel with linguistic processes and driving our decisions to a much higher degree than is generally suspected. Amongst the "honest signals" that influence our behavior is perceived vocal attractiveness. Not only does vocal attractiveness reflect important biological characteristics of the speaker, it also influences our social perceptions according to the "what sounds beautiful is good" phenomenon. Despite the widespread influence of vocal attractiveness on social interactions revealed by behavioral studies, its neural underpinnings are yet unknown. We measured brain activity while participants listened to a series of vocal sounds ("ah") and performed an unrelated task. We found that voice-sensitive auditory and inferior frontal regions were strongly correlated with implicitly perceived vocal attractiveness. While the involvement of auditory areas reflected the processing of acoustic contributors to vocal attractiveness ("distance to mean" and spectrotemporal regularity), activity in inferior prefrontal regions (traditionally involved in speech processes) reflected the overall perceived attractiveness of the voices despite their lack of linguistic content. These results suggest the strong influence of hidden nonlinguistic aspects of communication signals on cerebral activity and provide an objective measure of this influence.
社交互动不仅仅涉及语言。与语言过程平行运作的、更为原始的非语言交流模式同样重要，它在很大程度上驱动着我们的决策，而这一点远远超出了人们的普遍怀疑。在影响我们行为的“诚实信号”中，有感知到的声音吸引力。声音吸引力不仅反映了说话者的重要生物学特征，而且根据“好听的就是好的”现象影响我们的社会认知。尽管行为研究揭示了声音吸引力对社交互动的广泛影响，但它的神经基础尚不清楚。当参与者听一系列声音（“啊”）并执行不相关的任务时，我们测量了他们的大脑活动。我们发现，对声音敏感的听觉和下额叶区域与隐含感知的声音吸引力强烈相关。虽然听觉区域的参与反映了对声音吸引力的声学贡献（“均值距离”和频谱时间规律性）的处理，但下前额叶区域（传统上参与言语过程）的活动反映了声音的整体感知吸引力，尽管它们没有语言内容。这些结果表明，隐藏的非语言交流信号对大脑活动有强烈的影响，并提供了这种影响的客观衡量标准。
