Speaker differences in volitional voice modulation reflected in empathy and functional activation patterns

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.