differenceblog, posts by tag: aural - LiveJournal

As early as John Corso (1959), it has been documented that women tend to have more sensitive hearing than men, and have less variability in hearing sensitivity than men do. McFadden (1998) notes that not only are women more sensitive to noise, but that they also have stronger evoked otoacoustic emissions (EOAEs) (sounds produced by the inner ear, and a measure of ear health). McFadden suggests that the differences may be due to hormonal effects, based on twin studies (pre-natally) and menstrual cycle studies (post-natally).

Here's where McFadden gets very interesting. McFadden and Pasanen (1998) examined differences EAOEs between heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals (both male and female). McFadden found that homosexual and bisexual women's EAOEs fell in between heterosexual women's and heterosexual men's. Bisexual and homosexual men did not show any significant difference from heterosexual men. McFadden feels that this suggests hormonal -- and possibly structural brain -- differences between homosexual and heterosexual women.

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Well, I obviously can't offer any personal experience on this one. I didn't even know you could make your ears make noise, so I haven't gone around clicking into people's ears. I believe that
McFadden found the results he reported, but his extrapolation seems a little enthusiastic. I was particularly interested in this study because it's the first one I've seen using women as the comparison group in a heterosexual/homosexual group. I have read so many arguments suggesting that women's sexuality is largely socially based (e.g. Roy Baumeister's 2000 review) that these findings struck me as unusual.

Last week (1/26/07), we looked at gender differences in musical preferences. The quality of the sound may be a factor as well. McCown et al (1997) found that males displayed a greater preference for "enhanced bass" in music. Interestingly, Mary Ann Clawson (1999) notes that women are overrepresented as bass players in rock bands. Differences in the genders ability to hear certain frequencies may influence this; Jerger et al (1993) found that men (on average) displayed greater hearing loss over 1kHz, whereas women (on average) displayed more hearing loss below 1kHz.

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When I was a kid, it seemed like every adult in my life had hearing troubles. "You have to speak up to talk to grandma" and "You know I can't hear out of my right ear" were nearly as common statements as the prompting "what do you say?" But one factoid that got trotted out to me over and over again was the idea that adults couldn't hear high sounds as well as kids could, which prompted me to start speaking as low in my register as possible by the time I was eight or nine. This concept is part of the idea behind the "Mosquito" (NYT, 11/29/05), a sound supposedly inaudible to adults but annoying to teenagers, which has been co-opted as a "teacher-proof ringtone" (NPR, 5/26/06). Before anyone else says it: it seems that if women are evolutionarily built for monitoring children, then retaining higher-pitched hearing would be more important for them. However, my suspicion is that this probably has more to do with aging hearing loss versus occupational hearing loss. I would be interested to see results specifically from people who worked in high-noise factories for decades, and see if there's a gender difference there.

Gualdagno and Cialdini (2007) examined persuasive techniques on counter-attitudinal topics. While they found that both men and women were more easily swayed by people they believed to be like themselves, men were more likely to be persuaded via e-mail, and women responded better to face-to-face interaction. This effect was especially pronounced when the persuader was considered "unlike" the subject.

Stern and Mullinix (2004) examined the persuasiveness of human vs. computer-generated speech. While they found that women were more persuaded than men in general, and that human speech was more persuasive than computer-generated speech in general, there was no gender-by-modality effect. Audio vs. video presentation seemed to have no effect.

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Who among us hasn't gotten a computer to swear? It seems to be a truism of human nature that if you sit someone down in front of a speech-generating-computer, the first thing they'll do is try to get it to curse, sometimes at length (stupid Speak & Spell, and its curse filters). The swearing computer never fails to amuse, perhaps because the computer has no meaning, no emotional tone behind its words. The removal of emotional tone may explain part of why men are more easily convinced by email, and why women are not. Gualdagno and Cialdini used same-sex confederates in their experiments on persuasion; I would be interested to see whether there was an opposite-sex effect.

In fairness, I should admit that I am fairly easy to persuade, but I could probably be talked out of that.

Canli and Gabrieli (2004) (pdf) , in a review of Hamann et al (2004) (pdf) for Nature Neuroscience, quote Woodrow Wyatt as saying that "a man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her ears." As previously discussed, it is believed that there may be physical truth to this statement, in that men may be more attuned to visual stimuli than women, especially as pertains to sexual arousal. Furnam and Bitar (1993) found that British advertisers more often used males as voice-overs and women as images, in what may be a nod to this phenomenon.

If true, this presents a problem for researchers studying sexual arousal. In order to study arousal in women, it may be more appropriate to use auditory stimuli rather than visual ones. However, the attempt to do this by Polan et al. (2003) did not show any correlation between presence of auditory stimulus and rate of arousal, using physiological measurements or self-reported levels of arousal. Youn (2006) points out that while many studies use visual or audiovisual stimuli, there has been very little research done with purely auditory stimuli (Youn's experiment used audiovisual stimuli).

While problems such as reactions to vocal types or language barriers may make studying auditory stimuli more difficult, it may be key to understanding differences between men's and women's arousal patterns. Wired's sex columnist Regina Lynn points out that recorded auditory erotica targeted to men has until recently been almost non-existent (although I wonder if recorded phone-sex lines count in her estimation). Whatever the difficulties, it seems clear that auditory stimulus research is not only needed, but long overdue.

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I'll admit it: my arousal patterns are more auditory than visual, and more verbal than non-verbal. My erotica of choice is generally first-person stories. I have not noticed any particular difference in these patterns since starting testosterone, but it's hard to tell. My consumption of porn was fairly low prior to testosterone. When my libido increased, I acquired a lot more, because I started to resent the amount of time I was spending masturbating, and wanted to speed the process up. In terms of auditory cues, I have found that it is nearly impossible for me to become aroused by audiovisual porn in which the soundtrack does not include the actor's voice or breath, but non-porn music tracks that include moaning or heavy breathing often get me embarrassingly worked up (in inappropriate situations).

Angus Loten reviews an Accenture survery (2006) released earlier this month that shows differences in the ways men and women handle customer service. The online survey of 1,000 people found that women would tend to ask to speak to a manager, while men would rather hang up and call back later. Women were also found to be more likely to complain about having to repeat information or about a CSR's tone or manner.

This finding is not particularly surprising. Lacohee and Anderson's survey (2001) found that women say that they enjoy being on the phone more and that they spend more time on the phone. Lacohee and Andersen also found that women were more proactive and men were more reactive in their interactions with the telephone. Therefore, it should not be surprising that women will complain about having to repeat information to several people when they are staying on the phone to speak to several people. The Accenture reports do not specify whether there was any correlation between asking to speak to a manager and complaining about repeating information, but it seems like a safe bet.

No one likes poor customer service, and there are often cases where switching providers for a particular product or service is not a viable option. An article by Marek Korczynski argues that front line customer service professionals are undergoing constant verbal assault by "abusive" customers. Perhaps a more useful survey would be to test the efficacy of the two approaches: hanging up and trying again vs. talking up the chain of command. Unfortunately, companies that provide customer service can not control which method callers use. Like men on the telephone, they can only react.