The Ethological Basis of Certain Signals of Affect and Emotion

Abstract

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2008) The ethological basis of certain signals of affect and emotion 1 John J Ohala, University of California, Berkeley Abstract A key assumption of ethology is that characteristic behavior of organisms is that which brings some benefit, or in the jargon, “increased fitness,” to them or their kin. Innate (genetically- determined) behavior has this characteristic, e.g., the broken-wing feint of different species of ground-nesting birds which draws prey away from the nest of chicks. (This is not to deny that characteristic behavior can also be socially-determined, e.g., obeying traffic laws, especially after the first penalty for not doing so). Morton (1977) has documented presumably innately determined factors which shape the vocalizations of several bird and mammal species’ in agonistic encounters (face-to-face competition). His generalizations apply equally well to certain behaviors that the human mammal also produces in agonistic situations but also, perhaps by some socially-determined extrapolation to characteristic intonations for question vs. declaration and to sound symbolic vocabulary designating small (and thus non-threatening and endearing) vs. large (threatening and impressive) entities (Ohala 1984). In this paper I review the evidence and theories underlying these connections between the sound shape and the meanings or communicative intentions conveyed by them and extend these principles to attempt to give a novel, if speculative, account of apparently similar cross-cultural use of the eyes and eyebrows in non-verbal communication where, again, the “messages” can be construed as conveying threat vs. non-threat. Two central element in this account are (1) the biological fact that the ratio of eye diameter to head diameter varies markedly with age: infants are said to have “large eyes”, in reality just a large ratio of eye diameter to head diameter, whereas in mature individuals this ratio is much smaller and (2) humans (and many other species) have the capacity to vary the apparent eye size and thus can exploit the apparent ratio of eye to head diameter for signaling emotion and affect. Introduction When someone speaks, several messages are transmitted. Acoustically the signal conveys information about the linguistic elements in the message (phonemes, syllables, words, phrases, and so on) – these are the elements that could be included in written transcript of the utterance (even if the full complexity of this component required IPA transcription). But the signal also conveys information about the speaker’s dialect (which may be a reflection of their geographical origin), their first language background or the degree of competence they have in the language they are speaking, their sex or sexual orientation, their approximate age, their state of health, possibly their level of education or “social refinement”, and their personal identity. In addition, the speech signal may convey something about the speaker’s attitude or emotional state (i.e., This is a revision of Ohala 1996.