Emotional Tone Of Your Voice Can Affect Your Mood
Participants also didn't know that the pitch of their voice had been slightly changed. It had been modified to sound happier, sadder or more fearful. For example, the higher the pitch, the happier the voice sounds. A tremble in the voice, on the other hand, communicates fear or anxiety. The researchers found that participants whose voice had been changed to sound happy reported feeling much happier. Participants whose voice had been changed to sound sadder reported feeling sadder. The findings suggest that when we use our voice to communicate emotions to others, we also listen to it to better understand how we feel.
A close up of a logo.
Aucouturier and the other scientists in France used this system to control how the voice sounded. They could make voices sound sadder or happier. Image: science team/Lund University. [click to enlarge]
"Normally, you sound like how you feel. Here, we created a strange, otherworldly situation where people sounded different than how they originally felt," Aucouturier later wrote in an email. "You could have expected that people could say, 'wait, that's not how I'm supposed to sound.'" Instead, the participants in this study ended up changing their feelings. They matched their feelings to what they had heard.
Read the section "Emotional Tone Of Your Voice Can Affect Your Mood."
Which sentence from the section describes the MAIN conclusion that scientists gathered from this study?
A
Participants also didn't know that the pitch of their voice had been slightly changed.
B
The researchers found that participants whose voice had been changed to sound happy reported feeling much happier.
C
The findings suggest that when we use our voice to communicate emotions to others, we also listen to it to better understand how we feel.
D
"Here, we created a strange, otherworldly situation where people sounded different than how they originally felt," Aucouturier later wrote in an email.
B
The researchers found that participants whose voice had been changed to sound happy reported feeling much happier.