
Why spiky shapes seem angry and round sounds are calming - hhs
https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/08/28/heres-why-spiky-shapes-seem-angry-and-round-sounds-are-calming/
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dade_
'we automatically associate variations in one particular property of images or
sounds with variations in levels of emotional arousal.'

The future is going to be great, the implications of these findings seem
obvious: auto-tune for my voice is coming so that people think I am thrilled
that they called.

To monetize it, they can sell it to contact centres so that sales reps sound
super engaged and interesting, and customer support reps seem genuinely
concerned.

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xvector
> they can sell it to contact centres so that sales reps sound super engaged
> and interesting, and customer support reps seem genuinely concerned.

This sounds so dystopian!

It might even be baked into some phones by default, kind of like image
softening to remove skin blemishes is the default post-processing for most
pictures in most phones today.

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jamesjyu
Seems similar to the Bouba/Kiki effect [1] where we automatically associate
spiky and smooth shapes with certain names.

I did this test with my toddler and he chose “correctly.”

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect)

~~~
joeyea
They mention this in the article:

 _This process could also account for the classic “cross-modal” finding, first
reported in 1929 and replicated around the world many times since, that people
tend to pair a blobby shape with a word-sound like “bouba” and a spiky shape
with a word like “kiki”._

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Rooster61
I think a possible alternate answer to why these associations exist would be
how the brain recognizes and utilizes patterns. The human mind appears
inclined to find patterns in stimuli and form conclusions from those patterns.
The inordinate amount of brain real estate that is lit up during facial
recognition is an example, as well as our tendency to hallucinate fake stimuli
in sensory deprivation scenarios after a time. Shrill, staccato noises and
their counterpart pointed, sharp images represent sudden changes in stimulus.
Unless those changes are regular, it tends to disrupt the brain's ability to
recognize the changes as a pattern e.g. a pop song, with often tread chord
progressions and rhythms tends to get stuck in your head much more easily than
say a Rush song, with odd time signatures and discordant melodies.

If you draw out these patterns, or lack thereof, as a graph chronologically,
be it changes in pitch, rhythm, timbre of a sound/music, or the
characteristics of drawn figures, such as change of the direction of a line
over distance, dramatic and frequent changes would make it harder to
interpolate what would happen if we kept the graph going. I postulate that the
brain associates regular, "round" patterns with happy or content emotions
because it too tries to interpolate the future state of these stimuli, and
uncertainty about that future gets associated with "negative" emotions that
are rooted in the amygdala and are tied to more survival-centric emotions such
as anger and fear i.e. fight or flight.

This might be total bunk, but that's the 2 cents from a non-psychologist :)

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beausievers
Thanks for the comment. Thoughts not dissimilar from yours are what drove us
to undertake these studies. :)

I definitely suspect that predictive processing in the brain is part of the
story, and we discuss that a bit in the paper. Interestingly, local entropy is
highly correlated with our "spikiness" measure, the spectral centroid.
However, where your comment focuses on macro-level regularity, like Bach
versus Rush, our study focused on micro-level texture, like the hum of a box
fan versus squealing brake pads. Although macro-level regularity definitely
has an impact on emotion perception as well! This is something my other
research has touched on, e.g.:
[https://www.pnas.org/content/110/1/70](https://www.pnas.org/content/110/1/70)

We also found that "spikiness" predicted emotional arousal for both positive
and negative emotions. E.g., "angry" and "excited" are both spiky across the
senses, while "sad" and "peaceful" are both smooth. So the results can't be
driven solely by uncertainty becoming associated with negative emotion.

Thanks for your thoughts! And here's a link to a preprint of the paper:
[https://psyarxiv.com/wucs4](https://psyarxiv.com/wucs4)

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pro_zac
Spiky shapes are like a dog showing its teeth or the fur standing up along its
back. It's how animals and even plants get you to keep your distance.

~~~
rllyboredonline
I figure this has to be it. In nature spikes are almost always dangerous,
whereas blobs are almost always relatively safe objects (typically soft, et
cet).

~~~
kylek
Markings on snakes are one of the more prominent examples. I don't have a
source, but I've read that human eyes are very well tuned to spot them- an
evolutionary advantage from when we were living in forests?

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hyperhopper
They say "Here's why", but they never explain why. They just found a
correlation in what people think. No reason as to why we think that way...

This could even potentially be just from societal conditioning.

~~~
beausievers
In the paper we do take a shot at explaining why. Specifically, we draw from
the literature on cognitive ethology to argue that the ability to quickly and
reliably read out emotion content from low-level stimulus features provides
better prediction of others' behavior, and therefore an evolutionary selection
advantage.

We don't rule out learning processes (e.g., social conditioning), but we do
examine evidence for some level of innateness. For example, cross-modal
Bouba–Kiki-like effects are present in pre-linguistic infants, and arousal
signals can be easily understood across species. It may end up that what is
innate is a predisposition to track and learn cross-modal correspondences that
are widespread in the environment.

Link to paper pre-print:
[https://psyarxiv.com/wucs4](https://psyarxiv.com/wucs4)

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swivelmaster
So cool to see this hitting the front page of Hacker News! I've known Beau
since we were in high school.

He occasionally posts about his research on twitter -
[https://twitter.com/beausievers](https://twitter.com/beausievers)

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beausievers
I am first author on this paper; glad to see it getting discussed on Hacker
News.

Here's a free, non-paywalled link to a pre-print version of the paper:
[https://psyarxiv.com/wucs4](https://psyarxiv.com/wucs4)

And here's a paywalled link to the published version:
[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2019...](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2019.0513)

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platz
Imagine something spiky hitting your face. It makes you angry. Then you see
another spiky. You have empathy with your past self, and project it onto the
thing. The new spiky is angry.

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lawlessone
surprised nobody else here mentioend this , but perhaps this is just a very
common form of synesthesia?

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partlysean
It would be interesting to see how different materials factor into these
perceptions. They mention the straight lines and sharp edges of brutalist
architecture, but if constructed out of wood instead of concrete, for example,
I would expect the forms to be perceived as softer and more organic.

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stanfordkid
Spiky things hurt and round things don’t — would be interesting to simulate
pleasure / pain of shapes against a virtual hand using a simulation then train
a deep net to learn the pain response. Bet you would have similar findings.

