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.

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.

August 22, 2015

August 22, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This is my fifth response to Chapter 5.4 “Vocalizations as tools for influencing the affect and behavior of others” by Rendall and Owren, (2010). As we don’t pay attention to how we sound while we speak, we accept Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) as normal. The other day I was at a presentation for faculty about equity. The teacher who presented this topic had invited a panel of students, who shared their experiences, struggles and triumphs at college. The teacher spoke with an intense, angry tone of voice. When she finally gave these students a chance to talk, what struck me was the difference in tone. The students sounded so pleasant and positive.

After the meeting was over I mentioned to one of my colleagues the contrast between the NVB of this presenter and the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) of these students. She responded she had felt the same way and was amazed by the irony of this NVB presenter, who talks so forcefully about equity. It was clear to my colleague that a speaker who is not treating the  audience well, must be like this to students as well. During this lengthy presentation about equity, the presenter showed a slide of three people of different sizes, who were standing on crates and were looking over a fence to watch a ball game. Each person stood on a crate of equal size, but since they were different in size, the smallest was still unable to look over the fence, the medium one could just see over it and the tallest had no problem seeing the ball game that was going on on the other side of the fence. This picture was meant to illustrate an example of equality, that is, they had all been given a crate to stand on. Equity, by comparison, was when the tallest person had no crate, since he was already big enough to look over the fence without one, the person of middle height had one crate and could see over the fence and the smallest person was given two crates so that he too could see over the fence. it was about individual needs. Although this image seems straightforward, it doesn’t capture the sensitivity faculty must have towards  students to be truly equitable. This lady was absolutely unaware of how she sounded, but everyone seemed to accept her speech as normal.

She talked for about one hour about equity with an aversive sounding voice and she got a loud applause. This teacher’s overemphasis on visual data by means of slides about equity statistics stood in stark contrast to the neglect of the auditory data presented by these students. This teacher, who represents the faculty, demonstrated the lack of connection between faculty and students. Although she gave the students an opportunity to speak, she didn’t connect with them. She spoke with the audience in admonishing and judgmental manner. She didn’t connect with the audience either. It was only the students, with their SVB stories, who connected with the audience. 

“Everyday experience and systematic perceptual studies on humans confirm that such screaming is extremely grating and aversive to listeners, and very effective in catalyzing responses from them". Responses obtained after a presentation about equity by a teacher like that are mandatory, coerced and consequently superficial. If equity had been the issue then how the faculty and staff talk with students should have been addressed. The tone of voice would be discussed, because equity depends on how we sound while we speak. However, this lecture was given by a semi-“dominant individual”, who dictated the college equity policy. Also she was infuriated about inequity and that presumably justified her NVB. 

“The functional value of such aversive screaming is not limited to immature animals, however, because adult animals can be equally impotent, particularly in highly social species with developed dominance hierarchies. In such species, daily activities involve regular interaction with more dominant individuals, who often antagonize and attack subordinate group members.” I rated her as a semi-“dominant individual” as she functions in the college hierarchy where she is in reality not very high on the totem pole.

Only on an occasion like this she represents authority and the forcefulness of her speech also derived from her insecurity. This brief analysis shows how important it is to pay attention to how we sound and to acknowledge that we all sound stressed during stressful situations. She seemed stressed about the presentation and her superiors must have been listening. “Like immature animals, such low-ranking victims of aggression cannot offer serious physical resistance to their dominant counterparts. However, they can make themselves unappealing targets of further attack by screaming vociferously. When experienced at close range, the aversive qualities of such screaming may be extremely aversive and quite difficult to habituate to, thereby testing a Dominant’s commitment to further antagonization."

In my country of origin, Holland, we have a saying ‘he is screaming already before he is hit’ which means we make a big fuss about something when nothing is really happening. With the above explanation, we have a reason why someone would scream before he is being hit. I was often hit by my father and I screamed to avert it. If we look at screaming as a way to avoid being hit, we will deal with it differently, as we are inclined to reassure the screamer that they are safe and will not be hit. We don’t realize our NVB sound may feel to someone as if they are being hit or are going to be hit. Also, we sound louder and more intense when we fear we will be judged or rejected by others. This is a much more parsimonious explanation for why someone would become manic.  The reassuring, supportive sounds which I just referred to can be described “sonants and gruffs” and they lay the foundation for what I call Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). “The vocal repertoire of most primate species contains an additional class of sounds referred to as “sonants and gruffs. ” This class of sounds is, in many ways, the structural antithesis of squeaks, shrieks and screams.”

August 21, 2015

August 21, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my fourth response to Chapter 5.4 “Vocalizations as tools for influencing the affect and behavior of others” by Rendall and Owren, (2010). Humans, like primates, have an “evolved sensitivity to certain kind of sounds” which “naturally creates additional opportunities for signalers to use vocalizations to engage others by influencing their attention, arousal and concomitant behaviors in many contexts, sometimes even overriding their ability to resist such influence.” The affect-inducing ability of any speaker has only two possibilities: the speaker induces negative or positive affect in the listener. In Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), the speaker’s voice has a threatening effect on the listener, but in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the sound of the speaker comforts and supports the listener. 

Among non-human primates “one entire class of vocalizations that has been labeled “squeaks, shrieks and screams” resembles the phylogenetic origins of NVB. “These sounds are numerous and diverse, and are produced by every primate species studied, as well as by many other mammals, birds and amphibians. This broad class of vocalizations is characterized by sharp signal onsets, dramatic frequency and amplitude fluctuations, and chaotic spectral structures, which are exactly the acoustic features that have direct impact on animal perception.” Humans make these sounds when they get angry or hostile or when they are in despair and cry for help. These sounds are only made when something’s wrong, when we are threatened. It doesn’t  matter whether we “squeak, shriek and scream” in an attempt to be heard, to defend ourselves or to fight others. Fact is, such a voice of a speaker is experienced as an aversive stimulus by the listener. This listener may not know he or she is aversively stimulated by the NVB speaker, but whether he or she  knows about it or not doesn’t make any difference, it still happens. 

 

In NVB the speaker has a very different sound than the SVB speaker. We are only going to be able to pay attention to this difference if we listen to ourselves while we speak. This difference can be heard in the sound of our own voice.  By listening to our own sound while we speak, we can figure out how we are affected by biological processes while we talk. Those who are threatened as well as those who threaten  produce the same “squeaks, shrieks and screams.” “Vocalizations of this class are produced especially frequently by infants and juveniles, and this pattern is not simply a reflection of an immature vocal production system in young animals. Instead, squeaks, shrieks and screams are likely to be especially functional to youngsters who otherwise have relatively little ability to influence the behavior of older and larger individuals in their groups.” Although this “pattern is not simply a reflection of immature vocal production system in young animals”, when we look at how this applies to human interaction a very different picture emerges. Humans, who still produce these demanding sounds at an old age, did not become fully verbal. We cannot be fully verbal as long as these nonverbal, unconscious sounds overtake us.

Another way of stating this is that NVB kept us unconscious. A child who doesn’t know how to speak can only make sound, but a child who knows how to speak is able to regulate him or herself and able to prevent him or herself from producing a sound which aversively influences the listener. This can only occur if this child grows up in a safe, sensitive and caring environment. Such a child doesn’t need to scream as it is nourished and taken care off. Calling the NVB speaker immature and the SVB speaker mature doesn’t capture that the NVB speaker is limited by involuntary processes. Speech of the SVB speaker doesn’t activate these fight-flight responses. When we grow up in stable, caring environments, we learn the basics of SVB, but when we grow up in chaotic, threatening surroundings, we are bound to be more inclined towards NVB. This lawfulness transcends the whole question about consciousness. We must be safe to be conscious.

Rather than considering these sounds immature, “squeaks, shrieks and screams are likely to be especially functional to youngsters who otherwise have relatively little ability to influence the behavior of older and larger individuals in their groups.” It is appropriate to make these sounds during the pre-verbal stage of development, but once we become verbal such sounds get in the way of speech. ”For example, a young weanling who has been repeatedly rejected from the nipple by its mother cannot physically force its mother to relent and allow nursing or close physical contact. However, it is not entirely helpless, because it is capable of producing loud protracted bouts of harsh and variable vocalizations that effectively influence the mother’s attention mechanisms, increase her arousal state, and with repetition become quite aversive.” The continuation of such “vocal protest” is maladaptive during verbal development as it aversively affects the listener and hinders interaction, which can only improve if noxious vocalizations no longer occur. The fact that NVB is ubiquitous and is basically accepted by everyone as normal signifies that things went wrong in the context of weaning, in the pre-verbal stage of development. “Vocal protests like this in the context of weaning are ubiquitous across species, including humans, and they share a set of common acoustic features that include rapidly varying combinations of loud, noisy screams and piercing high-frequency tonal cries, with dramatic amplitude and frequency modulations." Freud may have had a point with his oral fixation after all.