You may have heard through the grapevinethat human communication can be broken down into three proportions:
55% of communication is body language, 38% is the tone of voice, and 7% is the actual words spoken.
Although, these proportions tend to change over the years because the jury is still out on this one; it is too simplistic to explain such a complex matrix but it did provide a nice framework for life coaches everywhere.
Indeed, so as not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, body language _is _vital due to the effects it has on the unconscious parts of our perception and body! For example, _mirror neurons _fire when we observe subtle cues in another’s body language which influences us to replicate the same movement in our own body. It happens spontaneously, and albeit unconsciously, and may have been a survival mechanism to prime the body for danger before we are aware of a threat - a useful trait given that social cohesion was so pivotal for our survival.
Fun fact: observing someone yawn, which causes us to yawn, is a result of these mirror neurons firing.
Of course, we have moved beyond merely mirror neurons to judge a person’s physical and internal state by using other higher neocortical functions such as empathy.
But the fact that body language can incite certain unconscious primal reactions within us should beg you to ask the question, does the voice have the same power to influence us?
Albert Mehrabian, the researcher who broke human communication down to three factors, was not wrong but there are elements within “the tone of voice” that have varying degrees of influence on us and our perceptions, and some more so than others. For instance, there are elements of the voice that can make us more attractive and appealing as a sexual partner, or the fact that there is a positive correlation for possession of certain vocal traits and those in positions of power! And none more powerful than the fact a voice can soothe a distressed infant.
In short, the answer is, yes!The voice possesses the same unconscious influence upon us as that of our body language, and we respond to certain voices without even having a glimmer of the ways it influences us.
Why What you Sound Like Matters
My previous article, How Your Voice Reveals Your Sexual Quality, spoke of the research presented on sexual dimorphism in the voice and how a male’s voice evolved due to sexual selection. The fact that a male’s voice is deeper than a female was suggested to occur so as to increase the appearance of dominance and that a low voice is associated with health and physical prowess, which ultimately made men more sexually attractive (Puts, D, A., 2006).
It also presented the fact that female deer choose potential mates by judging males on auditory cues heard within their groans during a specific three week mating period every year. The findings showed that male deer with lower fundamental frequencies and a wider dispersion of formants were deemed more socially dominant by females and thus proved more successful when it came to pass on their genes (Vannoni, E., McElligott, G, A., 2008). We aren’t deer, but we still share many of the same characteristics that other mammals and primates possess when choosing a partner.
The role our voices have on sexual attraction has been studied to show that:
_Men with high androgen (testosterone) levels have voices with low F0 (pitch) and women preferred these males, especially close to ovulation. _(Puts, D, A., et al cited in Vannoni, E., McElligott, G, A., 2008)
Other studies have shown that a low fundamental frequency, whatever sex you are, shares a positive correlation to possession of leadership roles or positions of power (Klofstad, C, A., 2012)! These researchers also pointed out a rather scary proposition, that perhaps this anomaly accounted for the fact that the majority of leadership roles held by men was due to the fact that males have larger vocal folds compared to women. This opens a pandora’s box given the biological limitations of one sex compared to another but these are still only a few studies and are not impervious to critique. Yet, so far we understand that the voice has unconscious influential aspects upon people’s perceptions and it has also been shown to alter our physiology.
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