News 
 
 The Sound of Status: People Know High-Power Voices When They Hear Them 
 
 Being in a position of power can fundamentally change the way you speak, altering basic acoustic properties of the voice, and other people are able to pick up on these vocal cues to know who is really in charge, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. 
 
 We tend to focus on our words when we want to come across as powerful to others, but these findings suggest that basic acoustic cues also play an important role: 
 
 “Our findings suggest that whether it’s parents attempting to assert authority over unruly children, haggling between a car salesman and customer, or negotiations between heads of states, the sound of the voices involved may profoundly determine the outcome of those interactions,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Sei Jin Ko of San Diego State University. 
 
 The researchers had long been interested in non-language-related properties of speech, but it was former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher that inspired them to investigate the relationship between acoustic cues and power. 
 
 “It was quite well known that Thatcher had gone through extensive voice coaching to exude a more authoritative, powerful persona,” explains Ko. “We wanted to explore how something so fundamental as power might elicit changes in the way a voice sounds, and how these situational vocal changes impact the way listeners perceive and behave toward the speakers.” 
 
 Ko, along with Melody Sadler of San Diego State and Adam Galinsky of Columbia Business School, designed two studies to find out. 
 
 In the first experiment, they recorded 161 college students reading a passage aloud; this first recording captured baseline acoustics. The participants were then randomly assigned them to play a specific role in an ensuing negotiation exercise. 
 
 Students assigned to a “high” rank were told to go into the negotiation imagining that they either had a strong alternative offer, valuable inside information, or high status in the workplace, or they were asked to recall an experience in which they had power before the negotiation started. Low-rank students, on the other hand, were told to imagine they had either a weak offer, no inside information, or low workplace status, or they were asked to recall an experience in which they lacked power. 
 
 The students then read a second passage aloud, as if they were leading off negotiations with their imaginary adversary, and their voices were recorded. Everyone read the same opening, allowing the researchers to examine acoustics while holding the speech content constant across all participants. 
 
 Comparing the first and second recordings, the researchers found that the voices of students assigned to high-power roles tended to go up in pitch, become more monotone (less variable in pitch), and become more variable in loudness than the voices of students assigned low-power roles. 
 
 “Amazingly, power affected our participants’ voices in almost the exact same way that Thatcher’s voice changed after her vocal training,” says Galinsky. 
 
 And the students’ vocal cues didn’t go unnoticed. A second experiment with a separate group of college students revealed that listeners, who had no knowledge of the first experiment, were able to pick up on these power-related vocal cues to determine who did and did not have power: Listeners ranked speakers who had been assigned to the high-rank group as more likely to engage in high-power behaviors, and they were able to categorize whether a speaker had high or low rank with considerable accuracy. 
 
 In line with the vocal changes observed in the first experiments, listeners tended to associate higher pitch and voices that varied in loudness with high-power behaviors. They also associated louder voices with higher power. 
 
 “These findings suggest that listeners are quite perceptive to these subtle variations in vocal cues and they use these cues to decide who is in charge,” says Galinsky. 
 
 This research was partially supported by a grant to the first author from the Dispute Resolution Research Center at Northwestern University. 
 
 All data and materials have been made publicly available via Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/cw6y8/?view_only=24a186cebd52441ea0170ed63caf70ab and https://osf.io/5hzv9/?view_only=94aa2b0312c3463493ca6f61c5fc3811, respectively. The complete Open Practices Disclosure for this article can be found at http://pss.sagepub.com/content/by/supplemental-data. 
 
 This article has received badges for Open Data and Open Materials. More information about the Open Practices badges can be found at https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki/view/ and http://pss.sagepub.com/content/25/1/3.full. ||||| Researchers at UCLA's Voice Center for Medicine and the Arts have recently examined the speech patterns of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina in a variety of settings to determine whether the presidential candidates followed the same voice modulation strategies. They researchers found that despite the politicians' varied messages, their vocal delivery remains the same. 
 
 "Our hypothesis is that persuasive goals change when you address a different audience, and this change is reflected in voice acoustics," said Rosario Signorello, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Head and Neck Surgery at ULCA's David Geffen School of Medicine. Signorello has been investigating the biological components of charismatic speech at UCLA for more than two years, and his previous research has involved examining the frequency characteristics responsible for voters perceiving politicians as benevolent or authoritarian. 
 
 He and his colleagues will present their current research on the charismatic speaking strategies of presidential candidate at the 171st meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Salt Lake City. 
 
 The researchers examined the fundamental frequency, also known as pitch, or F0, of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Carly Fiorina in three different settings -- political rallies, meetings with other political figures, and nonpolitical talk show interviews. They found that in large venues filled with voters, all four figures employed a very wide fundamental frequency range, a method Signorello and his colleagues previously demonstrated as key to being perceived as charismatic. 
 
 When the four politicians were formally addressing other leaders -- Clinton addressing the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, Sanders speaking to the U.S. Senate, and Trump and Fiorina appearing at a New Hampshire Leadership Summit -- the researchers found that the speakers varied their pitch from very low to medium, eschewing high frequencies altogether. This pattern of use is also found among other mammals, where lower frequency voices often reflect physical size, power, or dominance. 
 
 "This vocal profile seems to reflect leaders' use of vocalizations to display dominance while addressing speakers of the same social status," Signorello said. "They use voice to convey their authoritarian charisma." 
 
 Signorello and his colleagues also examined the vocal profiles of Clinton, Sanders, Trump and Fiorina in more casual, nonpolitical settings, such as late night talk shows, finding that they use a "healthy" voice, or the normal, non-varying voice they use to speak with their families. 
 
 "We found that the leaders -- both Democratic and Republican, both genders -- have a similar voice profile which is completely different than the other voice profiles in the other [rally and peer] communication contexts," Signorello said. 
 
 Signorello and his colleagues currently plan to further investigate the biological basis of charismatic speech in social structures by examining vocal patterns in nonhuman primates. "The goal of this research is to find a link between species, to demonstrate that the similarities in vocalizations between male and female charismatic speakers, in different languages and cultures, are the result of an evolved way of using vocalization by a group's leaders."
– When we want to be perceived as powerful—think parents scolding misbehaving kids or shoppers haggling with car dealers—we tend to focus not just on our words, but the way we deliver them. Researchers at San Diego State University report in the journal Psychological Science that when people want to portray themselves as powerful or authoritative, their voices go up in pitch, become more monotone, and exhibit more variation in loudness. What's more, listeners hear and identify these differences as powerful, reports Medical News Today. The researchers were inspired to study vocal volume and inflection because of the oft-told story of Margaret Thatcher's vocal coaching when she became prime minister of the UK, reports the Association for Psychological Science. "It was quite well known that Thatcher had gone through extensive voice coaching to exude a more authoritative, powerful persona," one researcher says. "Amazingly, power affected our participants’ voices in almost the exact same way that Thatcher's voice changed after her vocal training," another says. (By this logic, these people are probably speaking pretty quietly.)