psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

, voice confrontation, which is related to self-confrontation, is the phenomenon of a person not liking the sound of their own voice. The phenomenon is generally caused by disappointment due to differences between what a person expects their voice to sound like to other people and what they actually hear in recordings. These differences arise both in audio quality, including factors such as

audio frequency An audio frequency or audible frequency (AF) is a periodic vibration whose frequency is audible to the average human. The SI unit of frequency is the hertz (Hz). It is the property of sound that most determines pitch. The generally accepted ...

, and in extra-linguistic cues about their personality.

Causes

The auditory perception of a person's own voice is different when the person hears their own voice live and through recordings. Upon hearing a recording of their own voice, a person may experience disappointment due to

cognitive dissonance In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as a mental phenomenon in which people unknowingly hold fundamentally conflicting cognitions. Being confronted by situations that challenge this dissonance may ultimately result in some ...

between their perception and expectation for the sound of their voice.

Audio differences

The perception of

hearing Hearing, or auditory perception, is the ability to perceive sounds through an organ, such as an ear, by detecting vibrations as periodic changes in the pressure of a surrounding medium. The academic field concerned with hearing is auditory sci ...

in humans is performed by the

auditory system The auditory system is the sensory system for the sense of hearing. It includes both the ear, sensory organs (the ears) and the auditory parts of the sensory system. System overview The outer ear funnels sound vibrations to the eardrum, incre ...

receiving mechanical

sound wave In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the ...

s in the

eardrum In the anatomy of humans and various other tetrapods, the eardrum, also called the tympanic membrane or myringa, is a thin, cone-shaped membrane that separates the external ear from the middle ear. Its function is to transmit changes in pres ...

. When the source of sound is another person, the sound waves are only received through the air (an external stimulus). However, when the source of sound is the observer's own

vocal cords In humans, the vocal cords, also known as vocal folds, are folds of throat tissues that are key in creating sounds through Speech, vocalization. The length of the vocal cords affects the pitch of voice, similar to a violin string. Open when brea ...

, sound waves also travel through the person's body to their ears (an internal stimulus). Laryngologist Martin Birchall described hearing one's own voice while talking as "hearing it through a cave complex inside our own heads" due to the sound traveling through

sinuses Paranasal sinuses are a group of four paired air-filled spaces that surround the nasal cavity. The maxillary sinuses are located under the eyes; the frontal sinuses are above the eyes; the ethmoidal sinuses are between the eyes and the sphenoi ...

and various parts of the

cranial cavity The cranial cavity, also known as intracranial space, is the space within the skull that accommodates the brain. The skull is also known as the cranium. The cranial cavity is formed by eight cranial bones known as the neurocranium that in human ...

. As a result, a combination of internal and external stimuli has a different sound quality and different

frequencies Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. Frequency is an important parameter used in science and engineering to specify the rate of oscillatory and vibratory phenomena, such as mechanical vibrations, audio ...

than external stimuli alone. However, audio quality differences are not the sole factors in voice confrontation, as participants of a 2013 study gave significantly higher ratings to their voice when they did not recognise it as their own.

Extra-linguistic cues

In 1966,

Philip Holzman Philip Holzman (1922–2004) was the Esther and Sidney R. Rabb Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Harvard University and one of the world’s preeminent scientists in schizophrenia research. His landmark studies of oculomotor function documented t ...

and Clyde Rousey concluded from their studies that voice confrontation also arises from differences in "extra-linguistic cues" that reveal aspects of personality which are only perceivable through recordings, such as anxiety levels, indecision, sadness, and anger. People are accustomed to the sound of their voice from the combination of internal and external stimuli, so people "build our self-image and vocal self image around what we hear, rather than the reality" according to Birchall. In a 1967 study, only 38% of people were able to identify recordings of their own voice within 5 seconds. The disappointment from extra-linguistic cues can be especially problematic for people with body dysmorphia and

gender dysphoria Gender dysphoria (GD) is the distress a person experiences due to inconsistency between their gender identitytheir personal sense of their own genderand their sex assigned at birth. The term replaced the previous diagnostic label of gender i ...

since they may perceive their voice as sounding like someone of the opposite gender.

In specific populations

In 1967, Holzman, Andrew Berger, and Rousey published a follow-up study on voice confrontation in

bilingual Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. When the languages are just two, it is usually called bilingualism. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolin ...

people who had learned a second language after age 16. The study showed that the bilingual subjects experienced greater discomfort when hearing their own recorded voices in their first language. Another study in 1970 found that people with

speech disorder Speech disorders, impairments, or impediments, are a type of communication disorder in which normal speech is disrupted. This can mean fluency disorders like stuttering and cluttering. Someone who is unable to speak due to a speech disorder is c ...

s experienced greater voice confrontation than those without such issues. The results of the same study also found that females show a "significantly greater semantic differential reaction to hearing their own voices".

References

External links