The Big and The Bad

Ethologists note that size cues are associated with aggression:

arching of back; hair bristling
hair around periphery of face; size cues appear at puberty

• aggression also associated with low pitch Ohala (1984), Morton (1994)
  
  
• high or rising vocal displays are associated with deference or submissiveness
  
  
• Bolinger (1964) showed similar results in a wide sample of human cultures.
  
  
• Large resonators tend to produce lower-pitched tones, so it is reasonable to suppose that low tones tend to evoke perceptions of larger size.
  
  
• 50% of pre-schoolers have learned the association between pitch and size (Hogg & Huron, 1993)
  
  
• John Ohala (1980, 1982) found transposing unintelligible speech upward in pitch, is judged as less aggressive and more polite
  
  
• downward transpositions evoked judgments of increased aggressiveness and confidence