Human Listeners Can Accurately Judge Strength and Height Relative to Self from Aggressive Roars and Speech

Raine, Jordan; Pisanski, Katarzyna; Oleszkiewicz, Anna; Simner, Julia; Reby, David

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2018.05.002

Cited by 27 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 49 publications

(66 reference statements)

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“…van Dommelen, 1993;Gonzales, 2003;Sell et al, 2010). Relatedly, there is evidence that listeners can judge the physical strength of a person based on their voice (Sell et al, 2010), although vocalization-specific effects are apparent: Studies find that listeners can most accurately judge strength from aggressive human roars than, for example, from fearful screams (Raine, Pisanski, Oleszkiewicz, Simner & Reby, 2018;Raine, Pisanski, Bond, Simner & Reby, 2019).…”

Section: Perceiving Physical Social and Psychological Characteristimentioning

confidence: 99%

A model of person perception from voices

Lavan¹,

McGettigan²

2019

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When we hear a voice, we instantly form rich impressions of the person it belongs to -whether we are familiar with this voice or whether we are hearing it for the first time. Despite the rich impressions we can form of both familiar and unfamiliar voices, current models of voice processing primarily focus on familiar voice identity perception only and do not explicitly account for the processing of unfamiliar voices. Where unfamiliar identity processing is described, it tends to be in the context of specific identity perception tasks, such that the extant literature is largely built on a distinction between familiar voice recognition and unfamiliar voice discrimination. We argue that the current focus of the literature is too narrow in its strong emphasis on identity-specific perception, and does not adequately reflect person perception from voices beyond experimental tasks. Here, we propose a broader, unified account of person perception from both familiar and unfamiliar voices. We suggest that listeners routinely perceive all person characteristics from voices via common recognition processes, based on representations -be those of a specific identity, speaker sex, accent, or a perceived personality trait. While explicit discrimination processes may still be used to disambiguate percepts, they are likely to play a smaller role in perception in naturalistic settings. We offer discussions of how this representation-centred person perception from voices may work, in terms of the nature of representations, their specificity and interactions of different kinds of representation.

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Section: Perceiving Physical Social and Psychological Characteristimentioning

confidence: 99%

A model of person perception from voices

Lavan¹,

McGettigan²

2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…predators) [14,15]. Scream-like voice calls thus aim to trigger certain behavior in potential listeners, similar to other types of alarm calls that are commonly expressed in high-arousal states of fear [16] or aggressiveness [17].Accordingly, human screams are assumed to share this acoustical and motivational nature of screams with other species, highlighting the alarming quality of such affect bursts to signal danger and to scare potential predators [1,4]. As being of alarming nature, screams thus demand urgent responses in listeners, implying a fast recognition and an accurate perceptual categorization [5,18] as well as neural efficiency in processing [1].…”

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confidence: 99%

“…The first limitation concerns the variety of primate screams, especially human screams. These studies largely focused on alarming fear screams [1,5,10] and sometimes on scream-like and alarming aggressive roars [17]. However, humans scream not only when they are fearful and aggressive, but also when they experience other affective states, similar to a variety of emotions that are more commonly expressed in less intense nonverbal vocal emotions [20], such as sadness, joy, and sensual pleasure.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Neurocognitive processing efficiency for non-alarm rather than alarm signaling in human scream calls

Frühholz

Dietziker

Staib

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Across many species, scream calls signal the affective significance of events to other agents.Scream calls were often supposed to be of generic alarming and fearful nature to signal potential threats including their instantaneous, involuntary, and accurate recognition by perceivers. However, scream calls are more diverse in their affective signaling nature than being limited to fearfully alarm a threat, and thus the broader sociobiological relevance of various scream types is unclear. Here we used four different psychoacoustic, perceptual decision-making, and neuroimaging experiments in humans to demonstrate, first, the existence of at least six generic and psycho-acoustically distinctive types of scream calls of both an alarming and a non-alarming nature, rather than being limited to only screams caused by fear or aggression. Second, based on perceptual and processing sensitivity measures for decision-making during scream recognition, we found that alarming screams (with some exceptions) were overall discriminated the worst, were responded to the slowest and were associated with the lower perceptual sensitivity for their recognition compared with non-alarm screams. Third, the neural processing of alarm compared with non-alarm screams during an implicit processing task elicited only minimal neural signal and connectivity in perceivers, contrary to the frequent assumption of a threat processing bias of the primate neural system. These findings show that scream calls are more diverse in their signaling and communicative nature in humans and that especially non-alarming screams, and positive screams in particular, seem to have higher efficiency in the cognitive, neural, and communicative processing in humans. KEYWORDSVoice; affect; scream; auditory cortex; fMRI; neural network;Vocal affect bursts, such as crying, grunting, or laughing, are a major part of the sociobiological communication across many mammalian species, especially primates. A specific type of affect burst is a scream call. Screams are relatively short, loud and intense, high-pitched, tremulous, and rough voice calls [1][2][3]. They have a far-reaching impact [1,4] and seem to be immediately recognized by, adaptively and rapidly responded to, and hardly ignored by perceivers [5,6]. Screams are thus assumed to be an effective mode of communicating affect signals that are of high relevance in any sociobiological interaction [1]. Scream calls have a long evolutionary trajectory across many species up to human primates. In nonhuman primates [7-9] and other mammalian species [10], scream-like calls are frequently used as some specific type of alarm signal exclusively in negative contexts, such as in in-group social conflicts between rank different animals. Screams by lower ranking animals help to recruit support from allies [11,12], while higher ranking animals scream to intimidate the lower ranking [13]. Furthermore, "SOS screams" signal the presence of environmental threat (e.g. predators) [14,15]. Scream-like voice calls thus aim to trigger certain beha...

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“…Thus, physical strength may be a Darwinian fitness indicator in men [6]. Male physical strength can be accurately assessed from facial and body morphology [7][8][9], vocal cues [10,11] and body movements, such as gait [12,13] and dance [14 -16]. Most of these studies have assessed men in industrialized societies, although the significance of male physical strength has also been documented for Hadza hunter -gatherers in Tanzania [17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessment of physical strength from gait: data from the Maasai of Tanzania

2019

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In industrialized societies, male gait provides information about physical strength. Male physical strength may be used by men and women to assess the fighting ability of rivals and the quality of potential mates, respectively. Women more than men discriminate between strong and weak walkers when assessing gait attractiveness. We presented videos of British men's gait-pre-categorized into strong and weak walkers-to male and female members (n ¼ 100) of the traditional Maasai in northern Tanzania in Africa. Maasai men and women judged the gaits of physically strong men less attractive than those of weak men and judged strong walkers to be weaker than weak walkers. These findings counter results from industrialized societies where participants accurately assessed strength from gait, thus arguing against a universal perception of physical strength from gait information.

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Human Listeners Can Accurately Judge Strength and Height Relative to Self from Aggressive Roars and Speech

Cited by 27 publications

References 49 publications

A model of person perception from voices

A model of person perception from voices

Neurocognitive processing efficiency for non-alarm rather than alarm signaling in human scream calls

Assessment of physical strength from gait: data from the Maasai of Tanzania

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