Like the sound of your own voice? You may be more emotionally in tune than the rest of us. This is the upshot of a study that suggests people use their voice to help them understand their own emotions.

You’d be forgiven for assuming that feelings come first, followed by their outward expression, but in the past few years it has become clear that it’s more of a two-way street. Our bodies play an active role in shaping our thoughts and emotions. For example, you may think that you smile because you are happy, but the physical sensation of smiling can create happy feelings. Now it seems our voice has similar powers.

A team led by Jean-Julien Aucouturier at the CNRS, the French national centre for scientific research, created a computer programme that allowed them to electronically manipulate the emotional content of people’s voices. They asked 109 participants to read a short story about buying bread, and then used the programme to modify each voice to sound either happy, sad or fearful.

When they listened to the altered recording, most people did not realise their voices had been altered in any way. “Everyone else around could tell their voice had been changed to happy or sad, but they couldn’t. They believed that how they were hearing it was really how they’d said it,” says Aucouturier.

Vocal emotions

Not only were the volunteers unaware of how they sounded, when asked how they felt 85 per cent gave answers that aligned with how their voices had been modified. Skin conductance tests confirmed that they did indeed feel this way.

“It is really a striking result that participants ended up updating their emotional state in response to whether their own voices were made to sound happy, sad or anxious,” says Aucouturier.

It makes sense to process the emotional expression in others’ voices, he says. “If you’re angry, I need to know about it because I could be in danger, but there does not seem to be any point in becoming afraid of the sound of a voice when you know it is your own. You could call it a bug in the system, like an auto-immune reaction.”

A more likely explanation, says Aucouturier, is that the volunteers used their voice to provide information about themselves: I sound happy so I probably am. “This is a completely novel finding – think about what you may infer about yourself the next time you have a sore throat and start sounding like Darth Vader.”

Therapy boost

“We infer our own emotions in much the same way as we infer them for other people,” says psychologist Simone Schnall from the University of Cambridge. “This study suggests that even subtle changes in vocal expression carry subjective meaning in the context of emotion regulation.”

It’s unclear how big a part voice plays in our emotional awareness since facial muscles, heart rate, breathing, all play a part in how we feel, says Aucouturier. “How all of these interact, and what prevails in case of conflicting evidence is still largely unknown. But voice is such a powerful and ubiquitous medium in daily expression of emotion that it’s bound to play an important role.”

Mark Huckvale at University College London treats people with schizophrenia via an avatar. He says that the technique could be applied in mental health therapy. “Feeding back the client’s voice sounding more cheerful could possibly boost the benefit of therapy.” It could help build the client’s self-confidence, he says.

Journal reference: PNAS,

(Image: Keith Morris/Alamy Stock Photo)

Dig this. For some dinosaurs, the way to a female’s heart may have been a soil-digging contest.

Researchers working in Colorado have discovered the first physical evidence that some dinosaurs competed in attention-grabbing displays to woo mates.

The structures, which date back to the Cretaceous, are comprised of raised earth ridges flanked by parallel troughs, and a type of dinosaur is thought to have dug them in order to catch the attention of females.

Three-toed footprints in some of the troughs suggest that a species of theropod – the group that included velociraptors and the ancestors of birds – were their architects.

“These discoveries provide a unique glimpse into dinosaur social behaviour,” says Brent Breithaupt of the Wyoming State Office, part of the team that discovered these 100-million-year-old tracks.

A sexual show

Deducing dinosaur behaviour can be difficult, because fossil traces of how individuals interacted with each other are rare. But the tracks made by these Cretaceous theropods were particularly large, which probably helped them to resist erosion for so long.

The largest trench identified by the team is 40 centimetres deep, and oval-shaped with a diameter of 2 metres. As sea levels later rose, sediments deposited on top of these dug-out areas probably also helped preserve them.

Analysing these scraped-out tracks, the team decided they must be signs of sexual displays. Unlike nests, which are usually similar and evenly spaced, these mounds and troughs were irregular in size and spread out in an uneven pattern. Nor was there any of the usual fossil evidence of young, such as eggshells.

The team says the structures could not have functioned as burrows or shelters, and the dinosaurs were unlikely to have been digging for water – a process that would have washed all this evidence away.

According to team member Martin Lockley of the University of Colorado Denver, the trenches could have enabled females to select their mates depending on who had the physical strength to dig most impressively – an important skill for building nests.

“Up until now there’s been no physical evidence of any kind for dinosaur courtship behaviour,” says at the Natural History Museum in London. However, he says he isn’t convinced that these particular tracks couldn’t have been made for some other purpose. “There is so much we don’t know about dinosaur behaviour,” says Barrett.

Bird-like behaviour

But of the University of Dundee, UK, agrees that these digging patterns could be a sign of sexual display.”Female evaluation of nest building skills would fit very nicely with their data,” he says. He suggests that after a male had demonstrated his architectural prowess, a pair may have moved somewhere else to mate and nest.

Today, some species of bird engage in similar scraping displays, including ostriches and some plovers. If multiple male theropods gathered in the same area to show off their scraping skills, this would have been an example of lekking – a type of competitive sexual display well-known in ruffs.

Competing in a lek can be costly, but is beneficial because it makes it easier for males to collectively attract females, while also providing the opposite sex with a chance to choose their favourite from several competitors, says Booth.

Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI:

Image credits (top to bottom): M. Lockley; Lida Xing and Yujiang Han