I like the sound of your voice: Affective learning about vocal signals

This paper provides the first demonstration that the content of a talker’s speech is sufficient to imbue the acoustics of his voice with affective meaning. In two studies, participants listened to male talkers utter positive, negative, or neutral words. Next, participants completed a sequential evaluative priming task where a neutral word spoken by one of talkers was presented before each target word to be evaluated. We predicted, and found, that voices served as evaluative primes influencing the speed with which participants evaluated the target words. These two experiments demonstrate that the human voice can take on affective meaning merely based on the positive or negative value words it has spoken. Implications for affective processing, the pragmatics of communication, and person perception are discussed.