Project on voice and empathy receives grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond

Gláucia Laís Salomão has been granted SEK 3.7 million from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for an upcoming project on empathy arising from emotional voices.

Gláucia Laís Salomão, PhD in Linguistics, is a researcher in speech and voice science with a background in phonetics, speech-language pathology and music. For the project Listening to others’ emotions: neural representations of empathy arising from emotional voices, she has now been granted SEK 3.7 million from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ). The project will run during 2023–2025.

“The project is about empathy, which is something that has fascinated me for a long time. How is it that we humans can share and even sense other people's feelings? Is it possible to imagine how we would relate to each other if we lacked this ability? Would we survive at all?” says Gláucia Laís Salomão.

Gláucia Laís Salomão in front of the MR scanner at SUBIC. Private photo
 

Investigating voice and emotions with neuroscientific methods

Previous research in neuroscience has suggested that people share the emotions of others by processing them (at least in part) using their own personal neural representations. This hypothesis has been tested in research on empathy in relation to facial expressions and emotional situations. However, it has never been tested on empathy arising from emotional voices and that is what Gláucia Laís Salomão and her colleagues now will do.

“I have been researching voice for many years and in different ways, including in collaboration with researchers at KTH and the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences in Geneva. Now it feels fantastic to be able to conduct voice research within the framework of neuroscience” says Gláucia Laís Salomão, who will carry out the experiments at the Stockholm University Brain Imaging Center, SUBIC.

We make subjective processes visible and measurable

She places her upcoming research in the field of affective neuroscience, where emotions are investigated with the same methods and techniques that are traditionally used to study mental processes such as language, attention and memory. One of these methods is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), i.e. brain imaging through a magnetic camera, with which the anatomy and neural activity of the brain can be examined. Another method is galvanic skin response (GSR), which measures physiological signals on the skin (for example, micro-sweating) that occur during emotional reactions.

“Through these methods, we can make subjective processes a little more 'visible' and measurable” explains Gláucia Laís Salomão.

 

Wish to contribute to the knowledge of how empathy works

Gláucia Laís Salomão will use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and galvanic skin response (GSR) to study the role of the voice in empathy. She will investigate

  1. which neural processes occur when people listen to and try to sense the emotions they perceive in other people's voices, and
  2. the brain activity of these people when they themselves express emotions using their voices.

The data from the fMRI examinations will be analyzed together with data from the GSR as well as information about the research subjects' own experiences of empathy. Researchers will then use different mathematical models to investigate whether there are common neural representations of the vocal expression of emotions and the perception of the same emotions in the voices of others.

“My goal is to contribute to a better understanding of empathy and the conditions where a lack of empathy indicates psychological or cognitive disorders. Our research results can also become relevant for computational models of emotions in the human voice which can improve communication between humans and computers” says Gláucia Laís Salomão.

Stockholm University Brain Imaging Centre (SUBIC)

Gláucia Laís Salomão’s profile