Research has shown that people often exert control over their emotions. By modulating expressions, reappraising feelings, and redirecting attention, they can regulate their emotional experience. These findings have contributed to a blurring of the traditional boundaries between cognitive and emotional processes, and it has been suggested that emotional signals are produced in a goaldirected way and monitored for errors like other intentional actions. However, this interesting possibility has never been experimentally tested. To this end, we created a digital audio platform to covertly modify the emotional tone of participants' voices while they talked in the direction of happiness, sadness, or fear. The result showed that the audio transformations were being perceived as natural examples of the intended emotions, but the great majority of the participants, nevertheless, remained unaware that their own voices were being manipulated. This finding indicates that people are not continuously monitoring their own voice to make sure that it meets a predetermined emotional target. Instead, as a consequence of listening to their altered voices, the emotional state of the participants changed in congruence with the emotion portrayed, which was measured by both self-report and skin conductance level. This change is the first evidence, to our knowledge, of peripheral feedback effects on emotional experience in the auditory domain. As such, our result reinforces the wider framework of self-perception theory: that we often use the same inferential strategies to understand ourselves as those that we use to understand others. emotion monitoring | vocal feedback | self-perception | digital audio effects | voice emotion

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While background music is often used during osteopathic treatment, it remains unclear whether it facilitates treatment, and, if it does, whether it is listening to music or jointly listening to a common stimulus that is most important. We created three experimental situations for a standard osteopathic procedure in which patients and practitioner listened either to silence, to the same music in synchrony, or (unknowingly) to different desynchronized montages of the same material. Music had no effect on heart rate and arterial pressure pre- and posttreatment compared to silence, but EEG measures revealed a clear effect of synchronized versus desynchronized listening: listening to desynchronized music was associated with larger amounts of mu-rhythm event-related desynchronization (ERD), indicating decreased sensorimotor fluency compared to what was gained in the synchronized music listening condition. This result suggests that, if any effect can be attributed to music for osteopathy, it is related to its capacity to modulate empathy between patient and therapist and, further, that music does not systematically create better conditions for empathy than silence.