Original ArticleInstant messages vs. speech: hormones and why we still need to hear each other
Introduction
Human speech consists of both tonal cues, which are used by a number of other animals as a means of conveying emotional color, and the ability to understand and generate grammatically complex content, which is ostensibly unique to our species. When speech takes place in person, these elements are also accompanied by nonverbal cues such as visual and olfactory components that can add complex nuances to the exchange, and overlying all is the intricate cognitive network enabling humans to perceive differences in meaning depending on the identity of the speaker and their relationship with the self.
Considerable work shows that regular social interaction is critical to both typical development (Kaufman et al., 2004) and adult health in our species (Norman et al., 2010), and given its centrality to the human experience it is likely that speech plays a role in such processes. Nonetheless, we still do not have answers to such basic questions as how speech is capable of changing the brain under species-typical behavioral circumstances or what the proximate mechanisms of such action may be. Very little work to date has examined the effects of speech on human biology, under naturalistic conditions, in real time. Without such inquiry, it is impossible to piece apart what elements of human speech are shared with other species and which are unique to our own.
Some information, however, is available. Recent work by Seltzer, Ziegler and Pollak (2010) indicates that speech between mothers and daughters is comparable to physical touch in its ability to decrease measures of salivary cortisol, a hormone that tends to increase after a challenging or stressful event, and increases urinary measures of oxytocin (OT), a hormone which appears to be associated with such phenomena as maternal–infant attachment (Uvnäs-Moberg, 1996) and other forms of affiliation between trusted individuals when relevant social cues are present (Carter, 1998, Kosfeld et al., 2005, Razzoli et al., 2003, Uvnäs-Moberg, 1997, Landgraf, 2005). The current study builds off of this previous work in attempting to discern which component of speech — the content of the words used or their tonality — may be responsible for this observation.
To address this question, we compared the hormonal responses of children hearing their mother's voice with those who communicated with their mother via instant message. This paradigm allows us to eliminate the prosodic elements of a phone conversation while controlling for conversational content. If children in the instant message group fail to show a similarly striking response in terms of OT or markers of stress like salivary cortisol to those able to hear their parent over the phone, then it is likely that the prosodic, auditory component of a familiar voice is responsible for the differences in hormonal shifts between these and children not permitted to interact with their parent after a stressful event. If, however, a similar hormonal pattern is observed even when all communication is accomplished via instant message, i.e., with no vocal cues at all, then this effect might be due to the unique role of the emotional content of linguistic exchange itself, which can only be observed in humans. This would highlight quite a unique quality of our species — the ability to translate a symbol into a hormonal response. Given the ancient nature of vocal communication in other vertebrates (Bass, Gilland & Baker, 2008), however, we hypothesized that instant messaging would fall short of auditory social cues in terms of eliciting a peptide response in human children.
Section snippets
Subjects
We recruited 68 girls between the ages of 7.5 and 12 (mean=9.85 years, S.D.=1.08 years) to participate in a study about the hormonal effects of human speech. Participants arrived at the laboratory at 4:00 p.m. to control for circadian fluctuations of salivary cortisol, after which they signed consent and assent forms, filled out questionnaires to evaluate relationship quality between mothers and girls (Parent-Child Relationship Quality; Furman & Giberson, 1995) and rested for 30 min in order to
Results
In order to control for individual variation in hormone levels, a metric of change from baseline was calculated using the difference between the samples collected at baseline and that collected 30 min after completion of the stressor. Hence, positive values indicate an increase in hormonal levels following the TSST-C, whereas negative values indicate a decrease. Analysis of variance was used in order to evaluate mean differences between the positive control, negative control, phone and instant
Conclusion
Earlier work illustrates that both physical touch and auditory cues in the form of comforting speech are capable of producing a similar release of the social peptide oxytocin in human children after a stressful event and also of reducing levels of salivary cortisol, which often increases in response to social challenge (Seltzer et al., 2010). Is the content of the exchange relevant, or is it the result of simply hearing a familiar and trusted voice? Put another way, are we observing a uniquely
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