The Effect of the Hemispheres of the Brain and the Tone of Voice on Persuasion

Authors: Rica Jell de Laza, Jose Alberto Fernandez, Andrea Marie Mendoza, Qristin Jeuel Regalado

Abstract:

This study investigates whether participants experience different levels of persuasion depending on the hemisphere of the brain and the tone of voice. The experiment was performed on 96 volunteer undergraduate students taking an introductory course in psychology. The participants took part in a 2 x 3 (Hemisphere: left, right x Tone of Voice: positive, neutral, negative) Mixed Factorial Design to measure how much a person was persuaded. Results showed that the hemisphere of the brain and the tone of voice used did not significantly affect the results individually. Furthermore, there was no interaction effect. Therefore, the hemispheres of the brain and the tone of voice employed play insignificant roles in persuading a person.

Keywords: Dichotic listening, brain hemisphere, tone of voice, persuasion.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1130275

References:

[1] Slaughter, V., Peterson, C., & Moore, C. (2013). I Can Talk You Into It: Theory of Mind and Persuasion Behavior in Young Children. Developmental Psychology, 49(2), 227-231. doi: 10.1037/a0028280.
[2] Simons, H., Morreal, J., & Gronbeck, B. (2001). Persuasion in Society. London: Sage Publications.
[3] Hall, J. (1980). Voice tone and persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38(6), 924-934.
[4] Cambridge dictionaries online. (2001). Cambridge University Press.
[5] Paquette-Smith, M., & Johnson, E. K. (2016). I Don’t Like the Tone of Your Voice: Infants Use Vocal Affect to Socially Evaluate Others. Infancy, 21(1), 104-121. Doi: 10.1111/infa.12098.
[6] Mehrabian, A., & Wiener, M. (1967). Decoding of inconsistent communications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6(1), 109-114.
[7] Mehrabian, A. (1971). Silent messages. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub.
[8] Wurm, L. H., Vakoch, D. A., Strasser, M. R., Calin-Jageman, R., & Ross, S. E. (2001). Speech perception and vocal expression of emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 15, 831–852.
[9] Nygaard, L. C., & Queen, J. S. (2008). Communicating emotion: Linking affective prosody and word meaning. Journal Of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception And Performance, 34(4), 1017-1030. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.34.4.1017.
[10] Alzahrani, A. D., & Almuhammadi, M.A. (2013). Left ear advantages in detecting emotional tones using dichotic listening task in Arabic sample. Laterality, 18(6), 730-747. doi: 10.1080/1357650X.2012.762373.
[11] Hatta, T., & Ayetani, N. (1985). Ear differences in evaluating emotional tones of unknown speech. Acta Psychologica, 60, 73-82.
[12] Zaidel, E., Kasher, A., Soroker, N., & Batori, G. (2002). Effects of right and left hemisphere damage on performance of the ‘‘Right Hemisphere Communication Battery’’. Brain and Language, 80(3), 510-535. doi:10.1006/brln.2001.2612.
[13] Kimura, D. (1967). Functional asymmetry of the brain in dichotic listening. Cortex, 3, 163-178.
[14] Geffen, G., & Quinn, K. (1984). Hemispheric Specialization and Ear Advantages in Processing Speech. Psychological Bulletin, 96(2), 273-291.
[15] Allen, M. (1983). Models of Hemispheric Specialization. Psychological Bulletin, 93(1), 73-104.
[16] Lindell, A. K. (2006). In Your Right Mind: Right Hemisphere Contributions to Language Processing and Production. Neuropsychology Review, 16, 131-148. Doi: 10.1007/s11065-006-9011-9.
[17] Blumstein, S. E., & Amso, D. (2013). Dynamic Functional Organization of Language: Insights From Functional Neuroimaging. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(1), 44-48. doi: 10.1177/1745691612469021.
[18] Yuvaraj, R., Murugappan, M., Norlinah, I. M., Sundaraj, K., & Khairiyah, M. (2013). Review of Emotion Recognition in Stroke Patients. Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders, 36, 179-196. doi: 10.1159/000353440.
[19] Alves. N. T., Fukusima, S. S., & Aznar-Casanova, J. A. (2008). Models of brain asymmetry in emotional processing. Psychology & Neuroscience, 1(1), 63-66. Doi: 10.3922/j.psns.2008.1.010.
[20] Jones, N. A., & Fox, N. (1992). Electroencephalogram asymmetry during emotionally evocative films and its relation to positive and negative affectivity. Brain and Cognition, 20(2), 280-299. Doi: 10.1016/0278-2626(92)90021-D.
[21] O’Doherty, J., Kringelbach, M. L., Rolls, E. T., Hornak, J., & Andrew, C. (2001). Abstract reward and punishment representations in the human orbitofrontal cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 4, 95-102. Doi: 10.1038/82959.
[22] Gramstad, A., Engelsen, B. A., & Hugdahl, K. (2003). Left Hemisphere Dysfunction Affects Dichotic Listening In Patients With Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. International Journal of Neuroscience, 113(9), 1177-1196. doi:10.1080/00207450390212302.
[23] Westerhausen, R., Woerner, W., Kreuder, F., Schweiger E., & Hugdahl, K. (2006). The Role of the Corpus Callosum in Dichotic Listening: A Combined Morphological and Diffusion Tensor Imaging Study. Neuropsychology, 20(3), 272-279.
[24] Ley, R. G. & Bryden, M. P. (1982). A Dissociation of Right and Left Hemispheric Effectsfor Recognizing Emotional Tone and Verbal Content. Brain and Cognition, 1, 3-9.
[25] Voyer, D., Bowes, A. & Techentin, C. (2008). On the Perception of Sarcasm in Dichotic Listening. Neuropsychology, 22(3), 390–399. doi: 10.1037/0894-4105.22.3.390.
[26] Godfrey, H. K., & Grimshaw, G. M. (2015). Emotional language is all right: Emotional prosody reduces hemispheric asymmetry for linguistic processing. Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition, 1-17. Doi: 10.1080/1357650X.2015.1096940.
[27] Grimshaw, G. M., Seguin, J. A., & Godfrey, H. K. (2008). Once more with feeling: The effects of emotional prosody on hemispheric specialisation for linguistic processing. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 22, 313-326. Doi: 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2008.10.005.
[28] Rodd, J. M., Johnsrude, I. S., & Davis, M. H. (2010). The role of domain-general frontal systems in language comprehension: Evidence from dual-task interference and semantic ambiguity. Brain and Language, 115(3), 182-188. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2010.07.005.
[29] Petty, R. E., & Briñol, P. (2014). Emotion and persuasion: Cognitive and meta-cognitive processes impact attitued. Cognition and Emotion, 1-26. doi:10.1080/02699931.2014.967183.
[30] Desteno, D., Petty, R. E., Rucker, D. D., Wegener, D. T., & Braverman, J. (2004). Discrete Emotions and Persuasion: The Role of Emotion-Induced Expectancies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(1), 43-56. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.86.1.43.
[31] Jameson, C. (2002). Great communication = great production. Tulsa, OK: PennWell.
[32] Rodriques, M. V. (2000). Perspectives of communication and communicative competence. New Delhi: Concept Pub.
[33] Ahn, D., Jin, S.A., & Ritterfield, U. (2012). 'Sad movies don’t always make me cry': The cognitive and affective processes underpinning enjoyment of tragedy. Journal of Media Psychology. 24(1), 9-18.
[34] Auditory Processing Disorder. (2011). Porter Academy. Retrieved April 12, 2016, from http://www.porteracademy.org/Auditory Processing Disorder.html.