surprised nobody else here mentioend this , but perhaps this is just a very common form of synesthesia?
Why spiky shapes seem angry and round sounds are calming
11–20 of 23 posts
Re: Why spiky shapes seem angry and round sounds are calming
#12They 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.
That is an extremely common complaint about this kind of study/argument/proposal, and honestly no less valid because of it.
Re: Why spiky shapes seem angry and round sounds are calming
#13'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 custo…
There’s help available, if not for you, for your children: https://books.google.com/books?id=R6E0AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA74&lpg=P...
Re: Why spiky shapes seem angry and round sounds are calming
#14Spiky 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.
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).
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?
Re: Why spiky shapes seem angry and round sounds are calming
#15So 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
Re: Why spiky shapes seem angry and round sounds are calming
#16I 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
And here's a paywalled link to the published version: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2019...
Re: Why spiky shapes seem angry and round sounds are calming
#17'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 custo…
> 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.
Re: Why spiky shapes seem angry and round sounds are calming
#18They 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.
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
Re: Why spiky shapes seem angry and round sounds are calming
#19Spiky 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.
Re: Why spiky shapes seem angry and round sounds are calming
#20I 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 :)