Personally valued voices engage reward-motivated behaviour and brain responses

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 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 generalize to personally known individuals.