Emotional Processes in Learning Situations

7Learning to Recognize Others: The Effect of Vocal Emotions

Virginie BEAUCOUSIN

CRFDP, Université de Rouen Normandie, France

“There are as many movements in the voice as there are movements in the mind, and the mind is deeply affected by the voice.”

(Cicero, De oratore)

Everyday we meet other people. We are able to identify these individuals when we have met them before and to recall information about them more or less accurately depending on their familiarity (celebrity or acquaintance): who they are, what their name is, when we last met them, whether we like them, what we last talked about, etc. This identification depends mainly on the person’s voice, face and body. This process allows for effective interpersonal interactions: we do not have to introduce ourselves every time in order to start a conversation.

This identification process can be impaired, leading to varying degrees of difficulty: it gives the impression of talking to strangers at the beginning of an interaction. There are two distinct syndromes: prosopagnosia, which is the inability to recognize a person from their face, and phonagnosia, which is the inability to identify individuals from their voice. The double dissociation between these two syndromes indicates that facial identification and voice identification are separate processes. Thus, these difficulties are often compensated for by these patients through the use of the cues that lead to preserved identification (facial or vocal), so that identification ...