The sounds of dominance.

A study was conducted to determine the effects of vocal cues on judgements of dominance in an interpersonal influence context. Physical measures of human vocal cues and participant ratings of dominance were obtained from videotapes of actors delivering short influence messages. After controlling for linguistic and visual content of messages, results indicated that mean amplitude and amplitude standard deviation were positively associated with dominance judgments, whereas speech rate was negatively associated with dominance judgments. An unexpected interaction revealed that mean fundamental frequency (F₀) was positively associated with dominance judgments for male speakers but not significantly associated with dominance judgments for female speakers. F₀ standard deviation was not significantly associated with dominance judgments. Results support the conclusion that dominance judgments are inferred from multiple sources of information and that some vocal markers of dominance are more influential than others.     

Nonverbal Behaviors,Persuasion, and Credibility

This study examined the relationships among nonverbal behaviors, dimensions of source credibility, and speaker persuasiveness in a public speaking context. Relevant nonverbal literature was organized according to a Brunswikian lens model. Nonverbal behavioral composites, grouped according to their likely proximal percepts, were hypothesized to significantly affect both credibility and persuasiveness. A sample of 60 speakers gave videotaped speeches that were judged on credibility and persuasiveness by classmates. Pairs of trained raters coded 22 vocalic, kinesic, and proxemic nonverbal behaviors evidenced in the tapes. Results confirmed numerous associations between nonverbal behaviors and attributions of credibility and persuasiveness. Greater perceived competence and composure were associated with greater vocal and facial pleasantness, with greater facial expressiveness contributing to competence perceptions. Greater sociability was associated with more kinesic/proxemic immediacy, dominance, and relaxation and with vocal pleasantness. Most of these same cues also enhanced character judgments. No cues were related to dynamism judgments. Greater perceived persuasiveness correlated with greater vocal pleasantness (especially fluency and pitch variety), kinesic/proxemic immediacy, facial expressiveness, and kinesic relaxation (especially high random movement but little tension). All five dimensions of credibility related to persuasiveness. Advantages of analyzing nonverbal cues according to proximal percepts are discussed.     

Flexing Gender Perception: Brain Potentials Reveal the Cognitive Permeability of Grammatical Information

A growing body of recent research suggests that verbal categories, particularly labels, impact categorization and perception. These findings are commonly interpreted as demonstrating the involvement of language on cognition; however, whether these assumptions hold true for grammatical structures has yet to be investigated. In the present study, we investigated the extent to which linguistic information, namely, grammatical gender categories, structures cognition to subsequently influence categorical judgments and perception. In a nonverbal categorization task, French–English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers made gender-associated judgments about a set of image pairs while event-related potentials were recorded. The image sets were composed of an object paired with either a female or male face, wherein the object was manipulated for their conceptual gender relatedness and grammatical gender congruency to the sex of the following target face. The results showed that grammatical gender modulated the N1 and P2/VPP, as well as the N300 exclusively for the French–English bilinguals, indicating the inclusion of language in the mechanisms associated with attentional bias and categorization. In contrast, conceptual gender information impacted the monolingual English speakers in the later N300 time window given the absence of a comparable grammatical feature. Such effects of grammatical categories in the early perceptual stream have not been found before, and further provide grounds to suggest that language shapes perception.     

Relative and Absolute Judgments of Speech Rate from Masked and Content-Standard Stimuli The Influence of Vocal Frequency and Intensity

In two previous studies, the perception of speech rate was found to be positively related to the vocal frequency and intensity of speech. In those studies, a single sample of spontaneous, content-masked speech was used to produce nine stimuli by factorially varying three levels of each vocal frequency and intensity, while controlling the actual speech rate of the stimuli. Participants were asked to judge each stimulus, preceded by a standard, “anchoring,” stimulus as to its speech rate, pitch, loudness, and duration. The purpose of the three studies reported here was to examine the generalizability of the previous findings by using stimuli that were nonmasked and/or were not preceded by an anchoring stimulus. In each study, nine speech stimuli were prepared, as described above, and participants were asked to make judgments about the rate, pitch, loudness, and duration of each stimulus. In the first study, the stimuli were masked but were not preceded by an anchoring stimulus. In the second study, participants listened to content-standard speech stimuli preceded by an anchoring stimulus. Finally, in the third study, content-standard stimuli without an anchoring stimulus were used. In addition, studies two and three used speech segments of a male and a female speaker. The findings from the three studies replicated the central findings of the previous studies. They suggest, in other words, that rate perception of speech is indeed influenced by vocal frequency and, to some extent, by intensity, and that these relationships are not materially altered by the speakers'gender.     

Professed impressions: What people say about others affects onlookers’ perceptions of speakers’ power and warmth

During a conversation, it is common for a speaker to describe a third-party that the listener does not know. These professed impressions not only shape the listener’s view of the third-party but also affect judgments of the speaker herself. We propose a previously unstudied consequence of professed impressions: judgments of the speaker’s power. In two studies, we find that listeners ascribe more power to speakers who profess impressions focusing on a third-party’s conscientiousness, compared to those focusing on agreeableness. We also replicate previous research showing that speakers saying positive things about third parties are seen as more agreeable than speakers saying negative things. In the second study, we demonstrate that conscientiousness-power effects are mediated by inferences about speakers’ task concerns and positivity-agreeableness effects are mediated by inferences about speakers’ other-enhancing concerns. Finally, we show that judgments of speaker status parallel judgments of agreeableness rather than of power, suggesting that perceivers use different processes to make inferences about status and power. These findings have implications for the literatures on person perception, power, and status.     

Need for Cognition and the process of lie detection

Four experiments investigated the influence of Need for Cognition on the process of lie detection. According to the basic assumptions of dual process models, only higher Need for Cognition leads to the use of verbal information when making judgments of veracity. People with lower Need for Cognition predominantly use stereotypical nonverbal information for their judgments. In both Experiments 1 and 2, participants saw a film in which nonverbal cues (fidgety vs. calm movements) and verbal cues (low vs. high plausibility) were manipulated. As predicted, when Need for Cognition was lower, only the nonverbal cues influenced participants' judgments of veracity. In contrast, participants with higher Need for Cognition also used the verbal cues. Experiments 3 and 4 tested the hypothesis that higher Need for Cognition leads to better discrimination of truthful from deceptive messages. Both experiments found that participants with higher Need for Cognition achieved higher accuracy at classifying truthful and deceptive messages than participants with lower Need for Cognition.     

Effects of salience and time pressure on ratings of social causality

A model is proposed to account for the effects of a target person's salience on judgments of that target. It is argued that salience leads to more extreme inferences in the direction implied by prior knowledge that is relevant to the judgment. This knowledge may include both specific information about the target being rated and general information about the class of stimuli to which the target belongs. Two experiments supported these hypotheses. When subjects were under time pressure to make judgments of a target person's influence in a social situation, their judgments increased with the salience of the target when they had prior knowledge that the target was generally high in social influence. However, their judgments decreased with the target's salience when subjects had prior knowledge that the target was generally low in social influence. When subjects were given ample time to make their judgments, however, the effects of target salience were attenuated. Possible implications of these findings for prior research on salience effects are discussed.     

Adjective–noun order as representational structure: Native-language grammar influences perception of similarity and recognition memory

This article describes two experiments linking native-language grammar rules with implications for perception of similarity and recognition memory. In prenominal languages (e.g., English), adjectives usually precede nouns, whereas in postnominal languages (e.g., Portuguese), nouns usually precede adjectives. We explored the influence of such rules upon similarity judgments about, and recognition of, objects with multiple category attributes (one nominal attribute and one adjectival attribute). The results supported the hypothesized primacy effect of native-language word order such that nouns generally carried more weight for Portuguese speakers than for English speakers. This pattern was observed for judgments of similarity (i.e., Portuguese speakers tended to judge objects that shared a noun-designated attribute as more similar than did English speakers), as well as for false alarms in recognition memory (i.e., Portuguese speakers tended to falsely recognize more objects if they possessed a familiar noun attribute, relative to English speakers). The implications of such linguistic effects for the cognition of similarity and memory are discussed.     

Same same but different!? The differential influence of smilies and emoticons on person perception

Emoticons (ASCII-based character strings) and smilies (pictograms) are widely used in computer-mediated communication as substitutes to compensate for the absence of nonverbal cues. Although their usage has been investigated in numerous studies, it remains open whether they provoke differential effects and whether they lead to person perception patterns similar to what is known from face-to-face interactions. Based on findings from research about person perception and nonverbal communication, we investigated the differential effects of smilies and emoticons with regard to recipients' mood, message evaluation, and person perception in an experimental online study (n=127) with a 2(smiley/emoticon) by 2(positive/negative) between-subjects design (with an additional control condition). Results generally support earlier findings, indicating that the valence of the cue (smiley or emoticon) affects the corresponding impression formation. Further, findings concerning the differential influence of both forms of cues show that there are no differences with regard to message interpretation, whereas smiling smilies have a stronger impact on personal mood than smiling emoticons. The perception of a writer's commitment was only altered by smilies, suggesting that they elicit a stronger impact than emoticons.     

EFFECTS OF SECOND LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY OF SPEAKERS AND LISTENERS ON PERSON PERCEPTION AND BEHAVIOURAL INTENTION: A STUDY OF CHINESE BILINGUALS

Do people at different levels of second language proficiency perceive and interact with other speakers differently? Conceptual analyses suggested three possibilities. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the hypotheses derived from the conceptual analyses. Forty Chinese undergraduates (half of whom were high and half of whom were low in English language proficiency) listened to English speeches by either high or low proficiency speakers, and rated the speakers on ten personality traits and ten behavioural intention items. High and low proficiency listeners did not differ in their impressions of the speakers or the behavioural intention towards them. However, speaker proficiency strongly affected the listeners' person perception and behavioural intention. Results from a hierarchical multiple regression supported the hypothesis that speaker proficiency influenced person perception, which in turn influenced behavioural intention.     

Listening, not watching: situational familiarity and the ability to detect deception

In 4 experiments, the authors investigated the influence of situational familiarity with the judgmental context on the process of lie detection. They predicted that high familiarity with a situation leads to a more pronounced use of content cues when making judgments of veracity. Therefore, they expected higher classification accuracy of truths and lies under high familiarity. Under low situational familiarity, they expected that people achieve lower accuracy rates because they use more nonverbal cues for their veracity judgments. In all 4 experiments, participants with high situational familiarity achieved higher accuracy rates in classifying both truthful and deceptive messages than participants with low situational familiarity. Moreover, mediational analyses demonstrated that higher classification accuracy in the high-familiarity condition was associated with more use of verbal content cues and less use of nonverbal cues.     

Affect Is Greater Than,Not Equal to,Condition: Condition and Person Effects in Affective Priming Paradigms

Affective primes may impact ensuing behavior through condition and person effects. However, previous research has not experimentally disentangled these two sources of influence in affective priming paradigms. In the current research, we simultaneously examine the influence of condition factors, in terms of prime valence, and person factors, in terms of affect reactivity and personality. In both studies, undergraduate participants (total N = 174) were primed with either positive or negative affective stimuli (words, Study 1; pictures, Study 2) prior to judging the likability of a neutral target (Arabic characters, Study 1; inkblots, Study 2). Although we did observe between‐condition differences for positive and negative primes, person‐level effects were more consistent predictors of target ratings. Affect reactivity (affect Time 2, controlling Time 1) to the primes predicted evaluative judgments, even in the absence of condition effects. In addition, the personality traits of Neuroticism (Study 1) and behavioral inhibition system sensitivity (Study 2) predicted evaluative judgments of neutral targets following negative affective primes. With effects for condition, affect reactivity, and personality, our results suggest that affective primes influence ensuing behaviors through both informational and affective means. Research using affective priming methodologies should take into account both condition and person‐level effects.     

Accuracy of Social Perception: An Integration and Review of Meta‐Analyses

This review examines the overall accuracy of social perception across several research topics and identifies factors that influence the accuracy of social perception. Findings from 14 meta‐analyses examining topics such as social/personality judgments, health judgments, legal judgments, and academic/vocational judgments were obtained. Social perception accuracy was generally moderate, yielding an average effect size (r) of .32. However, individual meta‐analytic effects varied widely, with some topics yielding small effects (e.g., lie detection, eyewitness identification) and other topics yielding large effects (e.g., educational judgments, health judgments). Several moderators of social perception accuracy were identified, including the nature of the information source, familiarity of the target, type of personality trait, and severity of the outcome being judged. These findings provide a comprehensive summary and novel integration of disparate findings on the accuracy of social perception. Concluding remarks highlight avenues for future research and call for cross‐disciplinary collaborations that would enhance our understanding of social perception.     

道德概念净脏隐喻及其对道德判断的影响

通过3个实验考察道德概念净脏隐喻的心理现实性以及道德概念净脏背景和净脏自身隐喻对道德判断的影响及其差异。结果表明：（1）道德概念净脏隐喻具有心理现实性,即被试在洁净背景上判断道德词的反应时更快,在肮脏背景上判断不道德词的反应时更快。（2）当将道德两难故事呈现在肮脏背景上时,相比于呈现在洁净背景上,被试更容易将故事主人公的行为判断为不道德,表现出隐喻一致性效应。（3）相比于肮脏自身启动,被试在洁净自身启动下对道德两难故事主人公的行为判断为更加不道德,表现出隐喻补偿性效应。（4）相比于洁净背景启动,被试在洁净自身启动下对道德两难故事的判断更加严厉;相比于肮脏背景启动,被试在肮脏自身启动下对道德两难故事的判断更加宽松。研究结果证明,道德概念净脏隐喻具有心理现实性,净脏背景和净脏自身隐喻均影响个体的道德判断,并且二者对道德判断的影响不同。     

Perceiving affect from the voice and the face

This experiment examines how emotion is perceived by using facial and vocal cues of a speaker. Three levels of facial affect were presented using a computer-generated face. Three levels of vocal affect were obtained by recording the voice of a male amateur actor who spoke a semantically neutral word in different simulated emotional states. These two independent variables were presented to subjects in all possible permutations—visual cues alone, vocal cues alone, and visual and vocal cues together—which gave a total set of 15 stimuli. The subjects were asked to judge the emotion of the stimuli in a two-alternative forced choice task (either HAPPY or ANGRY). The results indicate that subjects evaluate and integrate information from both modalities to perceive emotion. The influence of one modality was greater to the extent that the other was ambiguous (neutral). The fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP) fit the judgments significantly better than an additive model, which weakens theories based on an additive combination of modalities, categorical perception, and influence from only a single modality.     

Acoustical correlates of the perception of speech rate: An experimental investigation

The purpose of the study was to investigate the influence of vocal frequency and vocal intensity upon the perception of speech rate at three levels of actual speech rate. A single sample of spontaneous speech was electronically varied to produce nine stimulus segments that factorially combined three levels each of vocal frequency and intensity. The nine stimuli were recorded such that preceding each was the original segment that served as the standard with which each of the nine stimuli was to be compared. The speech rate of the set of nine stimulus pairs was then electronically altered to obtain a slow set, a moderate set, and a fast set, although the duration of every segment in the three sets was 20 seconds. The sets were rated by different groups of judges in terms of four 7-point scales that measured perceived speech rate, pitch, loudness, and perceived duration. The results indicate that the perception of speech rate is positively related to vocal frequency and intensity at each of the three actual speech rates, and suggest that these relationships are a function of the repeated experience of almost always hearing such covariation in spontaneously occurring speech.The authors are indebted to the Language Laboratory of the University of Maryland Baltimore County and are grateful for the generous amount of computer time provided by the Computer Centers of the Baltimore County and College Park campuses of the university. They are also indebted to Mr. George J. Johnson, Jr., for the design and construction of the instrument used in the study, to Drs. Edwin Susskind and Jahathan Finkelstein for their active concern about the meaning of the results, and to Dr. Klaus Scherer for his very helpful critique.     

Predicting lexical accent perception in native Japanese speakers: An investigation of acoustic pitch sensitivity and working memory

Spoken language perception may be constrained by a listener's cognitive resources, including verbal working memory (WM) capacity and basic auditory perception mechanisms. For Japanese listeners, it is unknown how, or even if, these resources are involved in the processing of pitch accent at the word level. The present study examined the extent to which native Japanese speakers could make correctness judgments on and categorize spoken Japanese words by pitch accent pattern, and how verbal WM capacity and acoustic pitch sensitivity related to perception ability. Results showed that Japanese listeners were highly accurate at judging pitch accent correctness (M = 93%), but that the more cognitively demanding accent categorization task yielded notably lower performance (M = 61%). Of chief interest was the finding that acoustic pitch sensitivity significantly predicted accuracy scores on both perception tasks, while verbal WM had a predictive role only for the categorization of a specific accent pattern. These results indicate first, that task demands greatly influence accuracy and second, that basic cognitive capacities continue to support perception of lexical prosody even in adult listeners.     

A new look at sensory attenuation. Action-effect anticipation affects sensitivity, not response bias

The systematic association of an action that a person performs with its sensory effects is thought to attenuate that person's perception of the effect of the action. However, whether learned sensorimotor contingencies truly affect perception, rather than just inducing a response bias, has yet to be determined. The experiment presented in this article comprised two parts: an action-effect association phase and a test phase, during which the actions' perceptual effects were tested. During the association phase, specific actions (left-key and right-key presses) were associated with specific visual effects (tilted Gabor patches). In the test phase, participants' left-key presses and right-key presses triggered the onset of a low-contrast tilted Gabor patch in 50% of trials (no stimulus was presented on the remaining 50% of trials). Participants were required to report the presence or absence of this tilted Gabor patch. Our results showed that participants' sensitivity (d') to the Gabor patches was reduced by 10% when the patches were triggered by the action they had previously been associated with. This finding indicates that a person's action does not induce a response bias (c), but changes the perception (d') of the learned action effect.