August 23, 2015

August 23, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my sixth response to Chapter 5.4 “Vocalizations as tools for influencing the affect and behavior of others” by Rendall and Owren, (2010). The basis for Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) in humans, are the “shrieks, squeaks and screams” observed in primates. These call types “tend to be relatively unpatterned and chaotic.” The basis for Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) are the “sonants and gruffs” made by primates. They “tend either to be tonal, harmonically-rich calls, or to be characterized by a more diffuse broadband spectral structure that is nevertheless regularly patterned.” SVB is fine-grained, sensitive, reciprocal interaction, but NVB is coarse-grained, hierarchical, forceful uni-directional interaction. In SVB  speaker and listener co-regulate each other, but NVB speakers dysregulate listeners. In SVB the speaker creates and generates attention, while in NVB the speaker demands and exhausts the listener’s attention.

In SVB there is acknowledgement and accurate expression of emotion, but in NVB there is no attention for emotion and therefore there is no accurate description of emotion. This is not to say the NVB speaker doesn’t elicit emotions in the listener. Surely, the NVB speaker induces powerful negative emotions in the listener. The SVB speaker, by contrast, says nothing that forces the listener. “While the chaotic features of squeaks, shrieks and screams are well-suited to having direct impact on listener arousal and affect, the more patterned nature of sonants and gruffs gives them less inherent affective force, either negative or positive.” In other words, the “sonants and gruffs” lend themselves for another way of learning. 

These direct or indirect ways of learning are facilitated by the sender and are not up to the receiver. The sender’s “sonants and gruffs” signal safety and positive emotions and this results into more complex behavior than direct-acting “squeaks, shrieks and screams.” Another reason for learning more complex behavior is that “these calls provide an excellent medium for revealing clear cues to caller identity through individual idiosyncracies. Such idiosyncracies routinely impart individually distinctive voice cues in acoustic features of these calls that are associated either with the pattern of dynamic action of the vocal folds or through resonance properties of the vocal tract cavities.” Whether we are taught by a dedicated, kind and sensitive person or by an authoritarian,  punitive, forceful teacher makes an enormous difference in what and how we learn. The latter impairs learning complex behavior. The army sergeant not only teaches different things than the piano teacher, he also sounds very different. As the teaching of the piano teacher involves closeness to the student it is no surprise that “sonants and gruffs” are used “in face-to-face social interactions.” The screaming army sergeant yells at his soldiers, who follow orders. 

The sound of the speaker’s voice influences the listener in such a way that he or she simply obeys and does what he or she is told or it allows the listener to interact with the speaker and engage in more complex forms of learning. “In the social groups of many primate species, one’s influence on other group members hinges on individual identity and social status, and therefore simply announcing one’s identity vocally can also influence the affect and arousal of others.” The fact that the teacher knows more than the student makes the teacher the authority, but it doesn’t need to mean that the teacher uses coercion to dominate the student. To the contrary, if the teacher uses his or her authority correctly, the student wants to learn as his or her tone of voice is appetitive to the student. In the teacher’s “sonants and gruffs”, in his or her kindness to explain and give support, the student recognizes the teacher’s identity. “Such identity cues provide additional explicit opportunities for influential individuals to leverage the social behavior of others by controlling the behavioral sequelae that follow from vocal exchanges, providing myriad opportunities for behavioral shaping through processes of conditioning and learning.”

As humans have yet to acknowledge SVB and NVB really exist in English, Russian and other languages, research about primate vocalization is in its infancy. If we would understand more about ourselves, that is, if we would acknowledge that the listener in spoken communication is always affected by the voice of the speaker, we could make more progress in understanding primates. As long as we don’t recognize it in ourselves, by listening to ourselves while we speak, we anthropomorphize and make it seem as if primates, like us, are ‘processing information.’ Of course, neither primates nor humans are ‘processing information.’ Like primates, humans too are affected by each other’s sounds. Language is playing once again a game on us. When we talk, we can experience our words as sounds again. In SVB, our words have meaning because they are experienced as sounds.  

Although they don’t mention, Rendall and Owren get close to recognizing SVB and NVB; in both kinds of interaction the listener is directly affected by the sound of the speaker. “Sonants and gruffs” relate to SVB, in which there is positive affect-induction, but “shrieks, squeaks and screams” relates to NVB and negative affect-induction. They identify three ways in which “vocal signals might exert functional affective influence on listeners.” The first one is the “quite direct influence that vocal signals can have on listener affect through stimulation of autonomic systems organizing and impelling basic behavioral action” as just described. The second mechanism is that the “vocal signals might influence listener affect and behavior more indirectly through general processes of conditioning.” A third “possible mechanism through which vocal signals might exert affective influence is through a process of affective and behavioral resonance.” As the reader hopefully already knows, I only use this research to back up the SVB/NVB distinction in human vocal verbal behavior. The speaker’s vocal signals condition the listener's affect and, in SVB, the speaker harmonizes with the listener.