Beauty Is In The Ear Of The Listener:The Cognitive Processing And Influential Factors Of Human Vocal Attractiveness

Attractiveness plays an important role in human daily life,such as mate choice,decision making and social interactions,thus has been widely examined in the field of biology,psychology and cognitive neuroscience etc.Although research of attractiveness has made important progress based on visual modality,it is still poorly understood how people perceive attractive information based on auditory modality.In fact,a large number of studies have confirmed that the perception of attractiveness is multi-modal,beauty is in the eyes of the beholder but also in the ears,enabling the appreciation of vocal attractiveness.Given the importance of vocal attractiveness in our life,it is of great interest to understand the neurocognitive mechanisms of vocal attractiveness processing.Therefore,two experiments were conducted to explore this question in the current thesis.In experiment 1,the dynamics of brain activation reflecting vocal attractiveness processing was examined by using event-related potentials(ERPs).Participants were asked to perform both an attractiveness-unrelated tone detection task(implicit task)and an explicit attractiveness judgment task(explicit task).Results showed that attractive voices elicited larger N1 than unattractive voices independent of task.When the speaker sex and listener sex being manipulated orthogonally,the N1 effect was only found in male voices.Then,an enhanced P2 was elicited for female voice versus male voice in both implicit and explicit tasks.Finally,the enhanced late positive component(LPC)in response to attractive versus unattractive voices were found for both genders to listen their same-and opposite-sex voice only in the explicit task.These results suggesting that attractiveness-relevant voice information is extracted already during the physical encoding stage,aligning with the findings of ERPs research on facial attractiveness.Then,the gender effect of P2 suggesting that gender information could be a sufficient condition for cognitive evaluation of vocal attractiveness.Finally,attractiveness effect of LPC suggest that the atheistic aspects of voice need voluntary appraised in a top-down way,thereby was influenced by task demand.Taken together,the results of experiment 1 shed light on the time course and associated neural dynamics of vocal attractiveness processing,that is,vocal attractiveness processing is mandatory in an early stage and strategic in a later elaborated processing stage.In experimental 2,the integration processing of vocal attractiveness and emotional valence of spoken word was investigated by using ERPs.Participants were asked to perform both an attractiveness judgment task and a word valence judgment task.Results showed that attractive voices elicited more negative N1 amplitude than unattractive voices in the word valence judgment task,while this effect was absent in the attractiveness judgment task.But in the subsequent time-window,an enhanced P2 and P3 amplitudes in response to attractive than to unattractive voices were found in the attractiveness judgment task,but not found in the word valence judgment task.The results show that although voice carries speech information,participants can still quickly extract voice attractiveness information,and this process is regulated by the direction of attention.Additionally,the P3 was elicited in the attractiveness judgment task,in which larger P3 was elicited by negative words than by neutral words,indicating that the detection of negative valence of words occurred earlier than full access to lexical meaning.Finally,the enhanced LPC in response to attractive versus unattractive voices were found in attractiveness judgment task,while a reversed effect was found in word valence judgment task,suggesting that the attractiveness and word valence information interact with each other during this time window.In all,the acquisition of attractiveness information precedes processes of meaning access,Listeners integrate voice attractiveness and emotional meaning at a later stage.Taken together,the present study not only sheds light on the temporal dynamics of vocal attractiveness processing,but also help to understand how vocal attractiveness influence the processing of emotion valence in spoken word.Importantly,the present finding suggest that the processing of vocal attractiveness is a multi-step process.