Guldner Stella, Nees Frauke, Flor Herta, McGettigan Carolyn
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Central Institute of Mental Health, Medical Faculty Mannheim, Heidelberg University, Germany.
Institute of Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience, Central Institute of Mental Health, Medical Faculty Mannheim, Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany.
PLoS One. 2025 Jul 28;20(7):e0325207. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0325207. eCollection 2025.
How we use our voice is central to how we express information about ourselves to others. A speaker's dispositional social reactivity might contribute to how well they can volitionally modulate their voice to manage listener impressions. Here, we investigated individual differences in social vocal control performance in relation to social reactivity indices and underlying neural mechanisms. Twenty-four right-handed speakers of British English (twenty females) modulated their voice to communicate social traits (sounding likeable, hostile, intelligent) while undergoing a rapid-sparse fMRI protocol. Performance in social vocal control was operationalized as the specificity with which speakers evoked trait percepts in an independent group of naïve listeners. Speakers' empathy levels, as well as psychopathic and Machiavellian traits, were assessed using self-report questionnaires. The ability to express specific social traits in voices was associated with activation in brain regions involved in vocal motor and social processing (left posterior TPJ, bilateral SMG, premotor cortex). While dispositional cognitive empathy predicted general vocal performance, self-reported levels of Machiavellianism were specifically related to better performance in expressing likeability. These findings highlight the psychological and neural mechanisms involved in strategic social voice modulation, suggesting differential processing in a combined network of vocal control and social processing streams.
我们如何运用声音对于我们向他人表达自身信息至关重要。说话者的倾向性社会反应性可能会影响他们在多大程度上能够自主调节声音以塑造听众对自己的印象。在此，我们研究了与社会反应性指标及潜在神经机制相关的社会声音控制表现中的个体差异。24名以英语为母语的右利手说话者（20名女性）在接受快速稀疏功能磁共振成像（fMRI）扫描时，调节自己的声音以传达社会特质（听起来友善、敌意、聪慧）。社会声音控制方面的表现通过说话者在一组未受过训练的独立听众中唤起特质感知的特异性来衡量。使用自我报告问卷评估了说话者的共情水平以及精神病态和马基雅维利主义特质。在声音中表达特定社会特质的能力与参与发声运动和社会加工的脑区（左侧颞顶联合区后部、双侧中央后回、运动前区皮质）的激活有关。虽然倾向性认知共情预测了总体发声表现，但自我报告的马基雅维利主义水平与在表达友善方面的更好表现具体相关。这些发现突出了参与策略性社会声音调节的心理和神经机制，表明在发声控制和社会加工流的联合网络中存在差异处理。
