Tag Archive for Emotional State

Tonality And Voice Depth

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The differences between the sexes is huge when it comes to our voices. Women’s voices are nearly twice as high pitched as men’s so with only rare exceptions, we all know which sex is speaking even without seeing them. The term “pitch” is defined as the voices “highness” or “lowness” of the voice which is affected by the natural body chemical androgen. Androgen is the male sex hormone which is also tied to physical prowess and aggressiveness and also loosely tied to a competitor’s health and vigor.

In 2005 Anthropologist David Puts used voice recordings of men to study the relationship between the tone of the voice and men’s attractiveness. He was able to increase and decrease the pitch of the voices using computer software to make the recording more or less dominant. Puts found that low-pitched masculine voices increased ratings of men’s physical and social dominance. He also found that men who felt they were more dominant than their competitors tended to lower their voices when speaking with them. Additionally, men who had deeper voices also reported having had more sexual partners over the year previous to the study. Naturally, women have also been shown to prefer men with lower pitched voices for short-term sexual relationships. Voice pitch can also help men rise in social dominance. For men, this means plenty. It means that lowering the voice can lead to a better attractiveness rating in the eye of women and can also be used as a tool to build dominance and leadership.

The pitch of the human voice also varies with emotional state. Even actors are able to portray different feelings based on their voice. You can imagine a father with his baby where he draws out his voice and makes it more like mom so he can grab his infants attention. Women can also lower their voices to be more like dad to scorn their children or conversely screech at them when they are really upset. The tendency to raise the pitch of the voice at the end of each sentence to make all statements seem like questions, is a bad habit adopted frequently by young women. If carried into adulthood, it can be disastrous in a business context. People read this inflection as a signal of insecurity and believe that you are unsure about what you are saying. In a business context, it is always best to be direct and act with conviction.

Who Smiles More, Men Or Women, And Why?

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Women smile more than men to appease them.

Women smile more than men to appease them.

The research on smiling shows us that women tend to smile the most and that they also tend to smile regardless of their emotional state. Men will and can get away without smiling the most as men who don’t smile are seen as dominant whereas women who don’t smile are seen as unhappy or angry. We might feel that this is simply a learned or cultural phenomenon but the fact is that smiling differentials between men and women happen very early in life. Little girls by the age of eight begin to smile much more whereas little boy lag further behind and they continue to lag behind into adulthood.

Women are obliged to smile to appease men according to researcher Dr. Nancy Henley at UCLA. She felt that women smiled simply to placate men and that since men normally occupy the dominant roles, women felt pressure to submit to their dominance. She felt smiling differences had nothing at all to do with women as nurturers and pacifiers. This might not be the whole story though. The research also shows us that while women that smile more are taken less authoritatively, women, regardless of their social status and position tend smile more than men. This is the case even when they hold similar job positions showing us that they smile more often even when they don’t have to Other research though confuses these findings and says that sometimes women of equal status to men, tend to use smiles similarly.

However, this certainly wasn’t the case for my wife, who, I had run a ‘smile boycott’ in light of the research done on smiles by Marianne La France. A ‘smile boycott’ is fairly simple, I explained to my wife, all she had to do was smile when she was happy and not smile when she wasn’t. You might try the same experiment for comparison. At first, she found it difficult to bring to consciousness the instances when she smiled because it happens subconsciously, but once she got the hang of it, she found that she smiled a lot.

In fact, at work, she smiled almost continuously, and so it was difficult at first for her to avoid smiling. She found that as she passed male colleagues in the hallways, she’d feel inclined to smile, even though they often failed to reciprocate. Men, she found, would merely nod their heads as they passed. When conversing with other female coworkers, they too tended to smile but if they didn’t, she reported back that she felt as if they were ‘rude.’ If she held a ‘non-smiling’ face for any prolonged period of time, she was questioned; “Are you okay?”, “Lighten up” or, “What’s bothering you?” She simply couldn’t get away with smile avoidance; the world wouldn’t let her. While this is far from scientific, it does illustrate well the trend we find in the scientific research. Women that don’t smile are reported negatively whereas women who smile more, tend to be viewed much more positively.

Further research shows us that smiling is in fact an option for the powerful regardless of their sex. Whereas less powerful people are required to smile more to appease those in higher positions, those higher up, need not placate those below. Interestingly too, is that women usually feel the need to please others, whereas men don’t, and they tend to correlate this need to please with smiling. Therefore this need to please might be at the root of all smiling. Armed with all this information, you can use the smile for your purpose, be it to placate, appease or neither.

Summary – Chapter 3

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In this third chapter we examined and compared the various influences on body language: genetic, learned and cultural. We found that in terms of genetics we all show similar roots and so display similarly across cultures, but that learning does play a role in how we might signal. We also covered emblems, illustrators, affect displays, adaptors and regulators which all form a part of what is called kinesics or how nonverbal behaviour relates to movement. Emblems, we found, are quotable gestures that are culturally specific which can be used as replacement for words and have a direct verbal translation. Illustrators are a second type of gesture that we use while speaking to help us paint a more descriptive picture such as talking about a boxing match and using a punching motion. Affect displays is nonverbal language that reveal our emotional state such as smiling or frowning and adaptors are movements or gestures that are used to manage our feelings or control our responses such as postural changes. Sometimes these adaptors have hidden meaning, but other times they do not, so caution is warranted. Regulators on the other hand control turn taking and flow when people speak with one another. Finally we covered high and low context cultures as it relates to touching and the ways various cultures meet and greet one another.

Recognizing Body Affect By Culture

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A universal facial expression - Anger.

A universal facial expression – Anger.

In 1969 researchers Albert Mehrabian and John Friar found that a person’s state, their mood, and their emotional state were reflected by changes in body positions. In this context we are referring to affect in terms of simple gestures like leg crossing and arm crossing to indicate a closed mind or palms up and arms uncrossed to show openness or a willingness to listen. In fact, most of this book covers body affect and systematically breaks it down in future chapters. This cultural discussion is therefore important in that it describes the universality of body language.

While little research has focused specifically on measuring emotion from body positions, it has been found that the central nervous system is responsible for perception of emotion and this emotion is fed back into our body’s machinery to produce affect. The ways in which people convey emotion through body positions (or affect) is mediated by many factors including age, gender and context. Despite these factors though, body positions due to emotion, also has a cultural component. It is generally agreed that the face holds particularly universal expressions in terms of emotions as mentioned in the previous section, but the remaining language spoken by the body seems less obvious.

For example, the Japanese tend to be less expressive with their body language overall and therefore rate others more intensely on their nonverbal language. In a 2006 study by Andrea Kleinsmith and her colleagues out of London it was found that even mild expressions were rated as more emotional by the Japanese subjects over the ratings of other cultures on the same affect. A Westerner in the eye of the Japanese appears like a flailing uncontrolled windmill with their arms moving about as they gesticulate while they speak, whereas the Japanese appear rigid and uptight to a Westerner. In the study however, the meaning behind body language was still rated similarly across all cultures showing that emotion does have universal traits and crosses cultures. Thus, while the amount of affect does vary across cultures, the meaning behind the body language crosses boarders.

Affect Or Emotional Displays

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A frown affect accompanies a sad story.

A frown affect accompanies a sad story.

Affect displays is subset of nonverbal language that reveal our emotional state. For example, if we are happy we can show enthusiasm, or if we are telling a sad story, we correspondingly show somber. Affect display include facial expressions such as smiling, laughing, crying or frowning.

Awareness of various kinds of affect and how it is used in speech will provide vital clues about the speaker and his or her intent. Affect displays occur in synchrony and within the rhythm of speech. They emphases certain words or phrases and are an integral part of speech and thought. They can tell us about the expressiveness of a person and also what they find most important in their speech by which words they choose to emphasize. Posture can also signal emotion as can a variety of other gestures.

Affect is also different from culture to culture. For example, Russians tend to smile much less than Americans and therefore an American might come across as overly friendly to a Russian. Conversely Russians might come across as disinterested or aloof to Americans because they smile less frequently. In reality, both cultures are neither aloof nor overtly content, they simply appear to be so as they are viewed through a complimentary cultural norm bias. There is no right or wrong way to display affect, which is to say that no culture is better or worse because it smiles, frowns or cries less or more than another during expression.