August 24, 2015

August 24, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my seventh response to Chapter 5.4 “Vocalizations as tools for influencing the affect and behavior of others” by Rendall and Owren, (2010). “In natural environments, an individual’s emotional response to events is a good heuristic to what aspects of the environment are important.” Thus, the listener responds differently depending on how the speaker sounds. The Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) speaker induces positive emotions in the listener, while the Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) speaker induces negative emotions. If people would have the chance, they would move away from the NVB speaker, but, unfortunately, this is often not the case as we don’t live “in natural environments.” 

“Affective learning” only occurs to the extent that we are free to move away from noxious-sounding speakers. If this is not impossible, as it so often is, we are conditioned by negative emotion-inducing voices. Such NVB voices “induce powerful autonomic responses in listeners”, but don’t “effectively serve also to highlight or tag salient events in the world, and thereby support additional learning about them.” To the contrary, ongoing NVB prevents learning because it elicits fight-flight response without the possibility of escape. I think that NVB is traumatizing, disempowering and self-defeating.

Vervet monkeys would never have been able to develop their typical alarm call system if their vocalizations were not followed by effective escape responses. “They produce a small number small number of different alarm vocalizations that are specific to the different major classes of predator that prey on them, and each predator requires the monkeys to engage a functionally different escape response.” However, only with ‘experienced’ adult listeners do these alarm calls elicit different responses “as though the calls themselves encoded referentially specific, or semantic, information about the type of predator encountered, similar to the way human words function." Unless the infant monkeys are taught by more mature family members how to respond appropriately to these different calls, they will not be able to learn how to do it. “Predator-naive infant vervets do not respond in adult-like fashion with differentiated escape responses to the different alarm calls.” Although they are born with an innate startle response and different alarm calls “preserve a common set of affect-inducing acoustic features”, only “over time, do infants’ responses begin to differentiate into the more adult-like repertoire of escape options.” During this time they must be exposed to and be conditioned by behavior of conspecifics, who they can see and hear. For vervet monkeys, alarm calls serve to escape from predators. “The powerful effects that the alarm calls of vervets have from the very start on attentional and affective systems likely serve to  tag the significance of these events for naive infants and promote additional learning about the different predators involved and the specific behavioral responses that follow and are appropriate to them.”

Take note that NVB is linked to survival. SVB can only be learned over time, as a result of the fact that there was safety and stability and at least for some time no need to struggle for survival. The authors state that “learning effects like this that are scaffolded on a foundation of affect induction might be critically functional not only in non-intentional species including primates, but also in many other species.” Species which don’t behave (verbally) like humans, are still able to “instruct naïve infants about predators and other dangers (or other aspects of the local environments, e.g. appropriate food items)” by means of sound. Indeed, “such vocalizations promote additional learning about the environment without either the adults or the infants being aware of this fact.” Only if alarm calls resulted in the appropriate response will there be time for more learning. 

NVB is at one end of the continuum of learning and SVB is at the other end. If something goes wrong in verbal learning we should pay more attention to nonverbal learning. Nonverbal species may “lack the social cognitive abilities that would motivate adult members to instruct naive infants about predators and other dangers”, but “alarm vocalizations that by themselves induce powerful affective responses in infants offer a functional, evolutionary “work-around” to the problem.” This should make us pay attention to how we sound while we speak, as our vocalizations induce the affective responses, which makes us into conscious communicators in SVB or into unconscious, imprisoned and entangled communicators in NVB.

“Learned affect” refers to the “conditioned response of the listener to the affective consequences of vocalizations” because particular sounds from the speaker become paired with “salient emotion-inducing acts.” As with primates, so also with humans “more dominant group members routinely antagonize their subordinates.” There is NVB each time speakers aversively influence the listener. NVB always involves speakers who dominate, coerce and intimidate listeners with their way of talking. In the world of primates “the dominant typically produces distinctive threat vocalizations while biting and chasing the subordinate”. Humans do more or less the same. 

“The dominant’s threat calls predict the associated, aggression-induced affect.” As we get too overly involved with what we say, we don’t pay attention to how we say things. Listeners don’t do what speakers tell them to do due to what they say, but because of how they sounded. Thus, “the dominant can elicit similar negative affect in previous victims by use of the calls alone.” However, dominant ones also may produce “an acoustically distinctive affiliative sound before approaching a subordinate with peaceable intent.” With primates this happens when “the dominant one inspects or interacts with females or infants in the group.” Under such circumstances, the subordinates will associate calls produced by dominant ones with “a different set of emotional responses, like those experienced during the positively-toned grooming episode that often follows approach and calling.” With humans too words become associated sound and only certain people are able to influence each other in particular ways.