Translator: Carlos Castillo Reviewer: Maria Pericleous
Thank you for the kind introduction,
I'm very excited to be part of this TEDx Bocconi U event.
The theme of the event is Perception,
and I am going to tell you about some research that we've done
on how we perceive emotion and language.
These are researches that I've done with James Adelman at Warwick,
and also with Martina Cossu; who's here at Bocconi with us,
and I want to start by telling you about an example
and seeing if you've ever had the same experience I've had.
Have you ever met someone and it seems like their name
didn't really fit them very well?
Right?
You see this guy accross the room, you form an impression of him
and then you meet him and you think: "You really don't seem like a Bruno",
right?
This happens, it's not just me, right?
So, I'm going to show you two figures and ask you if you can identify
which one of these is Bruno.
Raise your hand if you think the one on the left is Bruno...
a few people...
Raise your hand if you think the one on the right is Bruno...
Everyone else.
So, the first group, I don't know what's wrong with you;
but the rest of us know that "Bruno" sounds big... okay?
Listen to the word, Bruno... it has big, deep sounds;
low frequency sounds that imply largeness.
Let me give you another example...
This is from a classic study by Köhler, nearly a century ago...
Two words: "Maluma" and "Takete"...
I'll show you the two figures...
Raise your hand if you think the one on the left is Maluma...
No one?
Raise your hand if you think the one on the right is Maluma...
It's amazing, every single person knows,
right?
How do you know?
You've never heard the word "maluma"... it's not even a word.
You've never seen this figure before... it's complete nonesense;
but somehow, we all know that "ma-lu-ma"
sounds very flowing, right?
It sounds big and soft.
Now listen to the word "ta-ke-te"...
it's choppy, it's sharp, right? And it matches the figure on the left.
So, what we're going to talk about today is not size or shape,
this is what we already know from these types of examples.
We're going to talk about emotions,
and we're going to see if there are certain sounds that imply emotion,
just like the name Bruno sounds big,
are there sounds of language that sound good or bad?
So, first we need to talk about phonemes...
this is a technical term;
these are the smallest units of sound in a language.
Words consist of phonemes arranged in a certain order.
So, as an example, the word "dog" has three phonemes:
"D", "O", "G", right?
You put them in that sequence
and you have the concept of a dog emerge in your brain;
if you rearrange those phonemes you get a different word,
different order in sounds, and different meaning.
So, we're going to be looking at phonemes
and see how these small units of language can convey emotion without words,
or as parts of words.
The nice thing about language is it's extremely functional...
Poetry is lovely, right? Poetry is fantastic,
but this is not why we have language;
language is for coordinated perception and action,
language is a way that we can control each other's minds and behaviors
to some small extent.
So, the most fundamental thing that language does for us
is it warns others of imminent dangers, like predators,
and opportunities, like foods.
This is the most fundamental thing that any language needs to have,
and in fact, the communication systems of other species also have signals
for dangers and opportunities.
So, imagine that you're sitting there checking your messages,
and you're not paying a whole lot of attention...
and somehow, out from nowhere, comes this little snake
slithering up behind you;
this is a very dangerous situation,
you don't know it's there, but you need to move,
and you don't know you need to move;
so language comes to the rescue.
This is what language does for us, it allows someone else to convey to you
"you need to adapt your behavior real soon".
So, the words allow us to respond adaptively to the environment,
that's why we have language.
So, more concretely,
a word like snake actually facilitates your visual perception of snakes,
and it actually activates your body for motion, very rapid motion.
An important aspect of language is that there are words that are negative,
like dangers, and they evoke negative emotions;
but, then there are opportunities,
like cash, that evoke more positive emotions.
So language can evoke emotions;
this is very basic, we all know this intuitively.
We know that words, like "snake" and "cash", evoke emotion,
but what we will talk about for the next few minutes,
is whether the smaller units, the sounds, the phonemes,
can also evoke emotions.
So what we hypothesize is that they do,
we hypothesize that just like some sounds are big, like "Bruno",
other sounds might be negative or positive;
I don't know what sounds they should be exactly,
but it would make sense if language did have sounds that were good or bad,
so we're going to test whether this is true.
The way we tested it was with a large cross-linguistic analysis;
we had 13,000 English words, 4,000 Dutch words,
and then 3,000 German, and 3,000 Polish words.
All of these 23,000 words have been rated for how negative or positive they are.
So here's what that would look like:
You get the word "hate", you get a scale,
and you simply indicate how negative or positive the word is.
Let's say, on the other hand, we have the word "chocolate",
not many people like chocolate, so let's give it a 3...
Just kidding. (Laughs)
So, the idea is: we have 23,000 words
that have been rated for how good or bad they are, okay?
Now what we're going to do is statistically analyze
whether some sounds are more likely to occur in bad words,
and others are more likely to occur in good words.
In fact, this is true.
So I'm going to give you some examples from English...
These are not all of them, there are other phonemes
that turn out to be good or bad sounding, but these are some examples.
The first good sound is "JH", like in "joy";
another one is "J", like in "yes";
and then we have "P", "V", and "AY", like "idea";
these are all significantly associated with positive words.
There are also bad sounds, for example:
"D", "S", "UH", like "ugly";
the "H" sound, as in "hurt";
and also "IH", like "icky".
We found significant associations between phonemes and emotion
in all four of the languages;
I won't show you examples from all of them,
but what we did find is that accross all four languages,
and within each of the languages, there are statistical associations.
In other words, there are some language sounds
that you don't consciously know it, but they send a slight negative signal,
and there are other sounds that subconsciously convey positive emotion.
Another important aspect of emotion and language
is that timing is literally vital for detecting dangers and opportunities.
They say the early bird gets the worm, the early bird also gets the cash;
basically, you'd better be fast or you're going to go hungry, okay?
When it comes to emotion we need this information quickly;
timing really matters here.
So, think about this for a second:
if you were to design a language,
knowing that emotion is really, really crucial,
and that timing is equally crucial;
what would you do with that language
to make the emotion be conveyed very quickly?
And think about the duration of a word accross time;
ideally, you would want the emotional information
at the beginning of the word.
So, that was what we hypothesized,
the first phonemes should be particularly emotion-evoking.
We tested this by comparing across these 23,000 words
the first sound, like the "s" sound in snake,
to the last sound, like the "k" sound in snake.
Again, we did this accross the four languages,
and what we find is that - let me explain this -
in English, the first sound of the word significantly predicts
whether the whole word will be good or bad.
In other words, the first sound gives you a clue
whether to expect something good or bad,
the last sound of the word does nothing.
The same thing happens in Dutch, and German, and even stronger in Polish.
So, again, consistent result across all four languages
that we've been able to test so far.
Another interesting and important thing about language and emotion,
is that dangers and opportunities are not equally urgent;
I think we all know this intuitively, but let me give you an example:
Which of these is more urgent? "Tuna" or "shark"?
Come on, everyone knows that the shark is more urgent.
Why is this? If you miss the tuna, if you miss an opportunity,
it's bad luck, it's unfortunate, but there are plenty of fish in the sea,
you will have another opportunity.
If you miss the shark you might not live to laugh about it, right?
If you miss the negative thing you could actually be fatally injured.
So, biologically, dangers are more urgent for us than opportunities.
There's a nice thing about phonemes and language,
which is that they are not pronounced at the same rate;
some phonemes are actually spoken more quickly than others.
So, to give you and example, the "OW" sound, as in "odor",
takes on average about 0.6 seconds to pronounce;
in contrast, the "IY" sound, like in "eel", takes 0.7 seconds.
Okay, it's only a tenth of a second,
but that tenth of a second could be the difference
between dodging the shark or not;
so, there are cases in which this tenth of a second
could actually be really helpful for us.
So, now we started thinking:
if phonemes are uttered at different rates, which they are,
and if dangers are more urgent than opportunities, which they are,
it'll be really nice if our languages have evolved such
that the phonemes that we can pronounce really quickly
are more common in negative words...
Are you with me?
We want negative phonemes to be fast ones so that we have maximum time to respond.
So, that was our hypothesis:
phonemes that are pronounced very rapidly
should be especially common in negative words.
So, this is a very simple graph;
it turns out that a correlation of 0.5 just looks like a diagonal line.
What this means is that phonemes that are pronounced very fast
tend to occur more often in negatively valenced words;
phonemes that instead are pronounced very slowly
tend to be more frequent in positive words.
So, indeed, there is some negative priority in our language.
The three main points so far - this is an interim summary -
the three main points are:
phonemes convey emotion,
there is a priority for negative information,
and it's front-loaded in words.
Now what we're going to do is take just a couple of minutes
and consider how this might impact your daily life.
So, we started thinking:
well, now that we know which sounds are good and which sounds are bad,
can we use this type of information to, for instance,
improve people's expectations of experiences
of products, and brands, and such?
So... let me give another example here,
what we know is that brands like Jeep, listen to the word, Jeep;
it's a short word, and it has a high pitched, small-sounding vowel;
the "EE" is small-sounding.
Listen to it again, Jeep;
it sounds small, just like Bruno sounds big.
So, if you want to build a much larger version of a Jeep,
the name isn't going to fit it,
it's like a really small guy called Bruno, right?
So, it would be better if we could match the name to the theme.
So, they can't call a really, really big one a Jeep,
they instead produce this thing and they call it a "Hummer", right?
Listen to it: Hummer;
it's a longer word, instead of three phonemes like Jeep,
we have now five phonemes, so it takes longer to pronounce,
and it has lower-frequency, deeper, bigger sounds.
This is about size, okay? We're talking here about emotion,
so we made an analogous prediction about emotions in language,
which is that consumers should prefer brands
that have good-sounding names, pretty sensible.
So, the first study that we did,
we asked a bunch of consumers in the US:
how much would you be willing to pay for a 16 oz. bottle of water?
For our European audience, 16 ounces is about a half a litre,
and the critical thing is that we showed consumers
one or the other version of our water bottle.
Half of them saw a very plain bottle of water
under the brand name "Vopi",
this includes positive-sounding phonemes.
The other half of them got the name "Dusa",
these are negative sounds.
And we asked them how much they'd be willing to pay for them,
and it turns out, the poeple who got "Vopi"
said that they were willing to pay about 24 cents more, on average,
than the people who got "Dusa".
So, we thought this is a pretty big fact, this is a pretty cool effect;
but, what are the possible limitations of this effect?
And more specifically,
are there some types of things for which we actually want a bad-sounding name?
Would you ever want a bad-sounding name?
So, we started thinking about this question
in terms of different types of products.
Promotional products are things that help you acquire some positive outcome,
whereas preventive products avoid a negative outcome.
So, let me give you some examples.
Plant food is great, plant food helps something positive grow.
In contrast,
insect repellent is preventive,
this is something that helps you avoid a negative outcome like a mosquito bite.
So, what we thought was that people might actually prefer
a bad sounding name for preventive products.
So, my co-authors and I did a whole series of experiments
where we asked people: "Which of the following would you prefer?"
and we showed them either a promotional product, like plant food,
with a good-sounding name or a bad-sounding name,
or other participants saw a preventive product,
like insect repellent, "Jope" is good-sounding name,
"Dort" is a really bad, stupid-sounding name.
We also did this with drain cleaner,
as another preventive product we've used weed killer.
So, lots of different products, preventive or promotional,
lots of different names.
And what we find accross all of these experiments is that
for promotional products, like plant food,
people do prefer the positive-sounding names,
just like with our bottle of water.
Okay, this makes sense;
the more interesting thing here is what happens with the preventive products.
When we're dealing with insect repellent, do we want a bad-sounding name?
And in fact, we do, so the effect completely reverses.
So, the main theme here is: phonemes convey emotion,
and that emotion influences our perception.
So, the next time you go to the grocery store,
and you're chosing a product,
or the next time you have a baby and give it a name,
think about how the name sounds,
because that influences our perceptions.
Thank you very much for your attention.