Behind a Voice There is a Speaker: Why Vocal Emotion Research Needs to Become ‘Personal’

The voice is a powerful social signal and a primary channel for communicating emotions when speakers are out of view. When we hear an emotional voice, we quickly form an impression of the person behind it. Neurocognitive models emphasize the multi-step dynamic operations that occur when listeners decode emotional information from vocal sounds. However, these models have primarily focused on stimulus quality, often neglecting the perception of other relevant person characteristics (e.g., gender, age, personal identity) evolving on different timescales. How do the emerging details about the speaker affect how listeners decode emotional information? And how are these different types of information integrated into a comprehensive impression of the speaker? This review examines recent data highlighting multiple stages of vocal expression analysis and the interplay between distinct types of nonverbal information revealed in the speaker's voice. It serves as a starting point for broader research examining how distinct person characteristics, perceived simultaneously or in close succession, interact and affect the decoding of vocal emotions.