June 29, 2015

June 29, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

There is support for Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB)from the field of evolutionary anthropology. The Affect Induction Theory argues that instead of sending and processing information, which is an anthropomorphic, agential, mentalistic account,  nonhuman primate vocal behavior is about influencing others. 

Today’s writing is a response to “An Affect-Conditioning Model (ACM) of non-human primate vocal signaling” (1997) by Owren and Rendall. “Callers are suggested to use vocalizations to elicit affective responses in others. Responses are either unconditioned being produced directly by the signal itself, or conditioned, resulting from past interactions in which the sender both called and produced affective responses in the receiver through other means.”  This conditioning paradigm, which was discovered by Pavlov, gives a scientific account for why SVB and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) occur. It explains why there is more NVB hierarchical signaling and little SVB, signaling based on ontogenetic instead of phylogenetic development. 

No matter how fancy we get with our language, all of our vocal verbal exchanges are rooted in our evolutionary history and are oftentimes completely impaired by it. "In this view, the social relationship between the sender and the receiver is an important determinant of what sorts of responses can be elicited and hence, which calls are used.” What matters for SVB is that the ACM functionally explains the behavior of the sender. In doing so ACM identifies that the speaker either evokes an appetitive response in the listener with SVB or he or she elicits an aversive response in the listener with NVB. These different responses tell us about dominance and hierarchy. 

“For instance, a sender that is subordinate to, or otherwise has little power over a given receiver also has little opportunity to use its calls as predictors of negative affective responses.” What this means for human interaction is that the SVB speaker doesn’t and can’t threaten the NVB listener. “It therefore relies primarily on vocalizations that have unconditioned effects. We refer to these calls as squeaks, shrieks, and screams, and propose that sounds of this general type should occur in acoustic variable streams – thereby maximizing unconditioned affective responses in the receiver while minimizing habituation effects.” 

We readily habituate to SVB, but not to NVB, because the sounds of the SVB speaker are subtle, sonorant, smooth, connected and rounded, while the sounds of the NVB speaker are harsh, jagged, fractured and coercive. The unconditioned effects of “squeaks, shrieks and screams” in nonverbal organisms are analogous to some of our troublesome songs, poems and stories.

In science nothing can be forced on the reality. In NVB, however, the speaker constantly forces the listener. NVB is inherently  biased. Science requires SVB, which can be verified by everyone, but NVB resists any kind of accountability because the speaker can get away with his or her forcefulness. “If the sender is dominant to the receiver, in contrast, it has ample opportunity to pair threatening calls with negative outcomes and can routinely induce and subsequently elicit conditioned affective responses. Such responses result from experiences in which the sender has produced individually distinctive vocalizations prior to attacking or otherwise frightening another animal. As a given receiver routinely hears many such calls, the identity of the sender is the most important predictor of upcoming events and this animal’s individually distinctive acoustic cues play a primary role in mediating any conditioning that occurs. Vocalizations used as conditioned stimuli must therefore carry salient, discrete cues to individual identity.” Here we have a description of NVB, in which everybody dances to the tune of those who can dominate and aversively control the conversation. 

In SVB, by contrast, such hierarchical differences don’t occur. Moreover, in SVB there is a total absence of aversive stimulation. “We argue that individually distinctive cues based on vocal-tract filtering are best suited for this role, and refer to such sounds as sonants and gruffs. Sonant and gruff calls should also be used by both dominant and subordinate senders in order to elicit positive conditioned responses.” These “sonants and gruffs” are analogous to the languages we speak, that is , in both  SVB and NVB we use language, but in the former our words are evoked, whereas in the latter, they are elicited. Another way of saying this is that in SVB verbal behavior is conditioned operantly, whereas in NVB, verbal behavior is conditioned respondently. 

“Such calls might occur, for instance, when an animal approaches a subordinate individual for grooming and attempts to decrease its fear during the approach. A subordinate animal should pair such calls with grooming or other positive outcomes when interacting with a dominant, thereby being able to elicit positive conditioned responses in that individual on other occasions.” This is a description of NVB as it is obviously a function of different status. The NVB dominant one switches to SVB and the subordinate one is no longer fearful and produces SVB too. However, the hierarchy remains and the dominant one always gets what he or she wants from the subordinate one. If the subordinate one is not giving what the dominant one demands, the dominant one will immediately switch to intimidation and threats and then subordinate gives in or he or she makes a lot NVB noise to distract the dominant one or to put him or her off.