NCT06126627

Brain and Voice Signatures in Teachers

Neurobiological and Psychobiological Signatures of Vocal Effort in Early Career Teachers

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 100 (estimated)
• Sponsor: University Hospital, Bonn · Academic / Other
• Sex: Female
• Age: 21 Years – 39 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Primary muscle tension dysphonia voice disorder with symptoms of vocal strain and vocal fatigue is common and can have a significant negative impact on quality of Life. Yet, primary muscle tension dysphonia's causes are unknown precluding precise diagnostic classification. Stress and personality are thought to play a role and thus, the project aims to determine the practical and clinical effect of stress on the control of voice and speech in the brain. Participants are female early career teachers and student teachers with symptoms of vocal fatigue, as well as control participants without vocal fatigue, who perform speech tasks on two different occasions. Neural (imaging of brain), psychobiological (saliva, personality), and voice and speech (muscle activity of voice muscles on the neck with surface sensors, audio recordings) data will compare reactivity patterns of teachers who are stressresponders with those who are nonresponders as well as control participants. The central hypothesis is that voice box stress responders have heightened emotion-motor activations involving the emotional voice production pathway, which correlate with changes in voice muscle activity in the anterior neck. The results will provide fundamentally missing data in our understanding of the role of stress in vocal complaints and will yield new insights about the neural underpinnings of primary muscle tension dysphonia. The study findings will have a significant impact on how clinicians identify so-called laryngoresponders to help them prevent voice disorders.

Conditions

• Voice Disorders
• Voice Fatigue

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Stress induction	Induction of anticipatory stress to compare voice and speech control and production with and without exposure to stress.

Timeline

• Start date: 2023-08-01
• Primary completion: 2026-06-30
• Completion: 2026-07-31
• First posted: 2023-11-13
• Last updated: 2025-08-27

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Germany