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. ||||| Even with very different messages, politicians may sound the same, new research finds. Scientists who analyzed the vocal stylings of four presidential contenders in the 2016 race – Hillary Clinton, Carly Fiorina, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump – found that all four candidates altered their voices in similar ways, depending on the audience. 
 
 The findings, described at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Salt Lake City, offer some insight into the vocal strategies of political speakers. 
 
 “Politicians use voice as a very powerful behavior to convey their charisma,” Rosario Signorello, a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA’s Department of Head and Neck Surgery and one of the researchers behind the work, said at a briefing this week. 
 
 See the most-read stories in Science this hour >> 
 
 When it comes to politics, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. There’s a good reason that some of the most successful politicians, for better or worse, are also known as outstanding orators, able to persuade large and diverse crowds with powerful speeches. But it’s not just about the words they choose; the same paragraph on chopped carrots might sound boring in a monotone speaker’s voice but riveting when recited by a Shakespearean actor. Seasoned politicians know this all too well; some presidential hopefuls in this once-crowded election campaign may have learned it the hard way. 
 
 Politicians, Signorello said, “are the best public speakers because they face every type of audience, from elementary school to very old people.” 
 
 Signorello wanted to see whether there was any way to pin down what makes a politician an effective speaker, by analyzing the strategies they use. So he analyzed the fundamental frequency (the pitch) of the voices of two Democrats and two Republicans: Clinton, Sanders, Trump and Fiorina (who has dropped out of the race). 
 
 The researchers looked at three different settings — political rallies, discussions with other political figures, and talk show interviews that did not feature political subject matter. After analyzing three different speeches for each of the three scenarios featuring each candidate, the scientists found that the four politicians shared some similar vocal behaviors – in spite of their differences in party or gender. 
 
 When speaking to large crowds, the politicians used a wide pitch range — a strategy that Signorello and his colleagues showed in previous work would help them be seen as charismatic. 
 
 “When the candidates addressed [an] audience of perceived and assessed lower status, lower social status, they would use a high vocal pitch range, a high vocal pitch average and a wide loudness range,” Signorello said. 
 
 This makes sense given the audience, he added. 
 
 “They have to diversify in their speech because they address an extremely diverse audience, so it’s like they’re focusing on subgroups of their audience and trying to fulfill each one’s expectation” of what a charismatic leader sounds like, Signorello said. 
 
 But when the politicians were addressing other politicians, such as when Clinton spoke to a United Nations commission, when Sanders spoke to the U.S. Senate or when Trump and Fiorina spoke at the New Hampshire Republican Leadership Summit, the candidates limited their pitch to the low and medium frequencies. That’s a pattern that’s meant to signal power and dominance — and it’s a well-worn strategy across the mammalian kingdom. A politician may lower their pitch range in this context because they want to hold their own among perceived equals, the scientist said. 
 
 “When they address leaders, the audience diversity is very, very restricted,” he pointed out. “They’re probably mostly male listeners of a certain age. So this is why the vocal behavior is adapted to that.” 
 
 When on a talk show chatting about nonpolitical things, however, the politicians all used their normal pitch range, without "stretching" their frequencies or loudness, he added. 
 
 So it sounds like politicians have tapped into some vocal strategies for impressing an audience. But that didn’t mean that they all share the exact same behaviors; different candidates had their own particular quirks. 
 
 Clinton and Fiorina, for example, tended to lower their fundamental vocal pitch when addressing large crowds, while Trump appeared to raise his. Sanders had a markedly wide pitch range over the course of a speech. 
 
 “Given that he has a very diverse audience in terms of age, cultural background, gender, he has to diversify a lot because he wants to be perceived as charismatic by everyone,” Signorello said of Sanders. 
 
 Next, the scientists also want to see whether politicians in other countries share similar behavioral patterns to those in the U.S., he added. 
 
 amina.khan@latimes.com 
 
 Follow @aminawrite on Twitter for more science news and "like" Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook. 
 
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– 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.)