We all know how important our voices are for us to be able to speak and communicate our thoughts and feelings. A new study, however, recently found out that we don't just speak how we feel; we also feel based on how we speak.
In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of six researchers concluded that hearing the sound of our own voices can influence our emotional state.
"This result is the first evidence, to our knowledge, of peripheral feedback on emotional experience in the auditory domain. This finding is of great significance, because the mechanisms behind the production of vocal emotion are virtually unknown," the study's abstract stated.
The researchers reached this conclusion after conducting an experiment involving 100 individuals. The participants were first asked how they felt at the time of the experiment, whether they were happy, sad or afraid.
The participants were then asked to read a short story out loud and wear headphones so they can hear their own voices. They were not aware that as they read the story, the pitch of their voices were being digitally manipulated to sound happier, sadder or more fearful. For the purposes of the study, a higher pitch was equated to happiness, while trembles conveyed anxiety.
After this exercise, the participants were once again ask to report how they felt. The findings were pretty interesting: those whose voices were manipulated to sound happier said they indeed were in a positive mood. Those whose voices were made to sound gloomier reported negative feelings at the end of the experiment.
"Normally, you sound like how you feel. Here, we created a strange, otherworldy situation where people sounded different than how they originally felt," lead researcher Jean-Julien Aucouturier said in an e-mail correspondence with PRI.org.
Aucouturier, who works at the French National Centre for Scientific Research at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, said that his team's findings were indeed "very novel."
"Voice is amazing in terms of the amount of information it conveys," he said.
