Kanber, Elise; Roiser, Jonathan P; McGettigan, Carolyn; (2025) Personally-valued voices engage reward-motivated behaviour and brain responses. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience , 20 (1) , Article nsaf056. 10.1093/scan/nsaf056.

Preview

Text nsaf056.pdf Download (2MB) | Preview

Abstract

Humans often attach notions of value to hearing the voices of specific loved ones, yet there is sparse scientific evidence supporting these claims. We present three experiments-two behavioural and one neuroimaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging: fMRI) - that tested whether personally-valued voices engage reward-motivated behaviour and associated brain responses. Using novel voice incentive delay (VID) tasks, we show that listeners respond faster in anticipation of hearing the speaking voice of their music idol than when anticipating an unfamiliar voice or a pure tone (Experiment 1). A second behavioural experiment indicated that familiarity alone was insufficient to engage stronger reward-motivated behaviour in comparison with an unfamiliar identity (Experiment 2). These behavioural patterns were further reflected in an fMRI experiment, where the idol voice condition most strongly engaged brain regions associated with reward processing while responses to other familiar and unfamiliar voice conditions were often equivalent (Experiment 3). Taken together, these studies provide evidence that voices can be effective rewards, in particular when they are associated with intense parasocial interest. Future research should determine whether these findings generalise to personally known individuals.

Download activity - last month

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as XMLCSVJSON

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as JSONCSVXML

Archive Staff Only

View Item