A study published in Frontiers in Psychology suggests that certain characteristics of mixed martial arts (MMA) fighters’ roars can predict their perceived abilities as fighters, but not their actual fighting success.
Animal research has shown that vocalizations play a role in displays of competition between males and these sounds are associated with fighting ability. Research in humans has mainly focused on visual cues and speech cues as expressions of threat potential. Fewer studies have considered the wide range of vocalizations that humans produce, such as “laughter, roars, screams, and grunts.”
Pavel Šebesta and colleagues were motivated to explore both verbal (utterances) and non-verbal (roars) among male MMA athletes. They were interested to determine whether these vocalizations could predict the fighters’ body parameters and fighting success.
A study was conducted among 40 male MMA fighters between the ages of 19 and 33. Participants were audio-recorded as they counted from 1 to 10, and then as they carried out three roars under the instructions, “Roar three times, as much as you can, to intimidate a potential opponent.”
Subjects’ body parameters were measured, including height, weight, amount of body fat, and muscle mass. Physical fitness, handgrip strength, and lung capacity were also assessed. Athletes who had taken part in more than two fights (29 subjects) were given scores for fighting success, and only these subjects were included in the analysis for fighting success.
A separate sample of 31 men and 32 women listened to the MMA fighters’ utterances and roars and rated how threatening the vocalizations were with the question, “How successful would this man be if he was involved in a physical confrontation?”, along a 7-point scale.
Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, it was found that raters’ perception of how threatening the vocalizations were was not correlated with the MMA athletes’ fighting success. Also unexpectedly, neither the athletes’ body height, weight, or muscle mass was found to predict how threatening their speech or roars were perceived.
The researchers did, however, uncover certain aspects of the fighters’ vocalizations that predicted the raters’ perceptions of the fighters’ abilities. Interestingly, acoustic analysis found that while the fighters’ speech was rated more impressive as it dropped in pitched, roars were rated as more impressive as pitch increased. Both roars and utterances were more impressive the higher they were in acoustic intensity (loudness).
The authors offer several explanations for why their findings contradict previous studies that have suggested that body strength can be predicted from vocalizations. One explanation concerns the possible inaccuracy of judging on-demand roars instead of real-life roars. They say, “the full expression of intimidating roars is not under complete volitional control, which is why it is possible that it can be expressed only in the appropriate context (e.g., when conflict is imminent). Using on-demand roars might not be a problem for judgements of strength but could be a key factor in formidability inferences.”
The authors express that their study adds to the research on the intricacy of human vocal expressions, saying, “our study points to a need of further investigations of non-verbal vocalizations in humans. Scholars seem to be so blinded by humans’ exceptional gift of speech that they tend to almost completely overlook the fact that this is not our only vocalization.”
The study, “Roar of a Champion: Loudness and Voice Pitch Predict Perceived Fighting Ability but Not Success in MMA Fighters”, was authored by Pavel Šebesta, Vít Třebický, Jitka Fialová, and Jan Havlíček.
