July 7, 2015

July 7, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing includes findings by the animal researchers Owren and Rendall published in “An affect conditioning model of nonhuman primate vocal signaling” (1997) and “The organizing principles of vocal production”  (2010). These two papers inform us about the genesis of human speech, particularly, the two universal classes of vocal verbal behavior: Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

From the moment we are born certain sounds are perceived as threatening and aversive, while others are experienced as safe and appetitive. This is apparent in the communication between a mother and her baby. Many vocalizations by humans are functionally similar to animal vocalizations.

 

Central to the model of nonhuman primate vocalizations presented by Owren and Rendall (1997) is the proposition that “the function of calling is to influence the behavior of conspecific receivers and that a Pavlovian conditioning framework can account for important aspects of how such influence occurs.” 

We humans also influence each other with how we sound while we speak.  “Callers are suggested to use vocalization to elicit affective responses in others, thereby altering the behavior of these individuals.” As speakers, we too alter behavior of the listener with an aversive or with an appetitive contingency. “Responses can either be 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.” 

A speaker’s voice is experienced by the listener in two categories: it is hurtful, threatening and dominating or it is affectionate, pleasant and attractive. In both cases, the voice of the speaker instantaneously elicits an autonomic, affective or aversive response in the body of the listener.

When certain experiences repeatedly occurred after the speaker has spoken with a certain tone of voice, classical conditioning changes this voice into a conditioned stimulus for the listener. This is why we do as we are told, to avoid punishment and to achieve approval. We engage in NVB in the case of punishment and SVB in the case of approval.   

"The social relationship between the sender and the receiver is an important determinant of what sort of responses can be elicited, and hence, which calls are used.” Also in the lives of humans speakers and listeners are seldom on equal footing; “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.” Speakers in a more powerful position than listeners are more capable of eliciting fear and escape behaviors in listeners, while speakers who don’t have that social status will not be able to elicit aversive or intimidating responses in the listener. No matter how much the “subordinate” speaker tries to plea, convince or argue, he or she “relies primarily on vocalizations that have unconditioned effects.” 

The whiny, attention-seeking calls by “subordinates” are referred to “squeaks, shrieks, and screams” and the authors propose these sounds are produced in order to “maximize unconditioned affective responses in the receiver, while minimizing habituation effects.” Thus, in NVB, speakers always produce vocalizations which demand the attention of the listener. 

The dominant individual, as a speaker, creates conditioned responses in the listener by pairing positively and affective responses with his or her vocalizations. An example of an unconditioned response is a child that cries for the attention from its mother. Mothers are generally not like dominant animals "conditioning affective responses” in their children because they have “ample opportunity to pair threatening calls with negative outcomes.” To the contrary, loving, caring mothers, avoid such forms of conditioning as much as possible.  Nonetheless, certain responses will be punished.

If the mother was conditioned by NVB, it is inevitable that she will condition her child with NVB as well. She conditions NVB responses in her child which “result from experiences in which the sender has produced individually distinctive vocalizations prior to attacking or otherwise frightening the other animal.” Since the “identity of the sender is the most important predictor of upcoming events” and since the child “routinely hears many such [warning] calls”, the child recognizes “individually distinctive acoustic cues”, which must “play a primary role in mediating any conditioning that occurs.” In the worst case scenario, instead of the mother parenting her child, such basically neglected children, in an attempt to elicit the attention from the mother, then begin to parent the mother.  

Healthy, protective mothers sound punishing and disapproving when their child does something which endangers or harms it. In the pre-verbal stage such NVB vocalizations create conditioned responses, which later play a role in discriminating between SVB and NVB. How the child is conditioned is determined by “vocalizations used as conditioned stimuli”, which “must  carry salient, distinctive cues to individual identity”. To survive and thrive, the child must recognize vocalizations of danger and safety. In other words, it must experience at an early age the difference between SVB and NVB. 

Vocalizations that are best-suited for creating conditioned responses in primates have “distinctive cues based on vocal tract-filtering” and are referred to by the researchers as “sonants and gruffs.” Interestingly, these vocalizations are used by dominant as well as subordinate senders to “elicit positive conditioned responses.” 

“When an [dominant] animal approaches a subordinate individual for grooming and attempts to decrease its fear during the approach,” the  sounds made by a dominant animal let the subordinate individual know that he or she is safe and not attacked. And, if a subordinate animal approaches a dominant one, he or she produces SVB “sonants and gruffs” to let him or her know that he or she is subordinate. 

What the affect-conditioning model (ACM) suggests is that “nonhuman primate vocalization need not have “meaning””. From this model it can be deduced that our human vocalization need not and does not have meaning either. The ACM not only recognizes variability in vocalizations, it provides an evolutionary explanation for why humans have evolved in this way. 

Essential to variability is “the inherent asymmetry” of sender and receiver. Also with humans this asymmetry is visible and, more importantly, audible. It is “the ability of the sender to mold the affective state of the receiver through simple conditioning processes” which is believed to apply to “more sophisticated cognitive processes, which allow receivers to modulate their own behavioral response to calls by evaluating the significance of such signals in a flexible, context-dependent fashion.” If only certain signals can facilitate these “more sophisticated conditioning processes” (SVB) it is imperative that other course-grained signals (NVB) prevent learning. 

  

The authors caution that “the excitement over evidence of human-like symbolism in the communication of both primates and other animals has also distracted attention from other important aspects of signaling.” The reason this occurs is because the “prevailing paradigm for understanding human cognition is based on representation and processing of information” and not on (what these authors suggest) how we influence each other with the sound of our voice. Instead of this “metaphorical” account, these authors argue that “information doesn’t literally reside in the energy of the signal, but represents an emergent property of the combined attributes of the individual producing the signal, the individual perceiving the signal, and the circumstances under which the signal is emitted” (Smith, 1977).  

As “vocal communication must have originated in unspecialized responses occurring to unspecialized energy transmissions” it is not quite clear how the “information-processing communication could evolve.” Although in this paper they don’t present such a framework, the authors describe a need “for a framework that includes more fundamental principles – accounting for aspects of communication that preceded information-processing, come to be information processing, and arguably now coexist with information processing.” Such a more elaborate framework than ACM would require a broader acceptance of the notion that humans, often, like primates, don’t process information, but are directly or indirectly influenced by how the sales-man, politician, priest, neighbor, wife, husband or child sounds. 

Broader acceptance becomes a reality once we identify the distinction between SVB and NVB and our involvement in these two response classes. Once this distinction is made it becomes crystal clear that only during SVB can we accurately, patiently and thoughtfully express, describe, elaborate on and analyze the environmental variables, which so often are hierarchical social variables, that determine how we sound while we speak.

While the ACM rests “on a number of observations and proposals concerning the social lives of primates”, distinction between SVB and NVB rests on the social lives of humans. The ACM “requires relatively detailed consideration of some important aspects of both learning theory and sound production”, but is explained by a couple of simple and straightforward “selected and illustrative examples.” 

SVB and NVB requires understanding of respondent as well as operant conditioning, but the simple and straightforward example of a speaker who speaks at, not with the listener, is sufficient for most people to understand what this entails based on their previous experience. It is easy to grasp that in SVB the speaker can become a listener and the listener can become a speaker, that SVB is characterized by turn-taking; in NVB, speaker's and listener's roles are predetermined, in other words, there is no turn-taking. 

Since the ACM outlines “a model that attempts to account for the basic design and function of primate vocalizations by treating the sounds as stimuli that senders use in order to elicit simple affective responses in the receiver”, this model can be extended to human vocalizations as the general characteristics are the same. 

Humans like primates live in an environment “that affords close visual and auditory contact among individuals.” Also, for humans it is true that “social relationship of any two individuals” is “shaped by repeated encounters that routinely occur in the course of everyday activity.” Furthermore, human relationship is as of yet characterized by “dominance-related behavioral asymmetries.” And, humans, like primates, recognize each other by how they look and sound. Moreover, humans have complex vocal repertoires, which nevertheless still include a wide variety of “tonal and noisy sounds.” 

Lastly, also in humans there is great variability in “typical production amplitudes” and “call acoustics within and among individuals” as well as “variability in the calls used in any given circumstance.” In behavior analysis continuity refers to the assumption of a similarity of behavioral principles or processes between non-humans and humans which is often considered to be a fundamental postulate of the field (Dymond, 2003).  Based on this assumption, if “the ultimate function of communication [in primates] is to influence the behavior of another individual”, there must be something quite similar going on with vocalizations by humans, although this is often covered up by the fact that we have language. 

Human vocalizations are equally well-suited for “influencing behavior of another individual” and there is nothing uncommon about the fact that primate and human vocalizations “benefit the sender by priming or biasing the receiver to behave in a way that is compatible with the caller’s best interests.” Humans respond as primates as “the general characteristics of the mammalian auditory system” are the same. 

While working with people from every social, cultural, ethnic, economic or political back ground, it has become clear that all participants respond in the same way to each other’s sound. “Some calls” must be “inherently noxious or pleasant based on phylogenetically ancient auditory processes that are shared by many primates and other mammal species.” There are, of course, “species- or genus-specific” specializations, but for the most part, humans produce and experience sounds just like other primate species. 

In the many seminars conducted by this writer, speakers were asked to listen to themselves while they speak. In doing so they discovered that something which has always been with them, their own sound, was unfamiliar to them. By listening while they speak they experienced their sound often for the very first time in their life and they realized what a profoundly beneficial impact this had on them. In effect, they transitioned from not listening to their own sound and producing NVB, to listening to their own voice while they speak and to SVB. Most strikingly is the unanimous agreement among listeners, who approve of the speaker's SVB, but disapprove of NVB. 

Naturally,  these seminars are conducted under controlled circumstances, which ordinarily only exist in moments of togetherness, openness, support, joy, friendship and playfulness. SVB instances only occur when the speaker and the listener reciprocally reinforce each other as they take turns. If this turn taking does not occur, that is, when the roles of speaker and listener become again hierarchically fixed, only NVB can occur.

The claim of these authors in this paper was that “conditioned affective responses play a central functional role in primate calling.” The authors emphasized that “the potential value of affective conditioning is proposed to depend on the nature of the interaction between the sender and receiver, as well as their respective positions in the social hierarchy.” An important finding was that “in the course of social interaction involving two individuals, both the more dominant and the more subordinate animal can produce calls that elicit conditioned responses. However, the individual that is dominant in a given encounter inherently has greater control over the outcome of this interaction than does the other. As a result, the dominant one can routinely pair its calls with other actions that elicit significant unconditioned affective responses in the subordinate. Such pairings produce conditioning, which the caller can thereafter use to elicit learned affective responses in this other animal in both affiliative and agonistic circumstances.” Thus, in NVB the speaker coerces the listener and forces the outcome to be in his or her favor; NVB is an unscientific way of talking.