Publication Date
2021
Journal or Book Title
Royal Society Open Science
Abstract
Animal communication has long been thought to be subject to pressures and constraints associated with social relationships. However, our understanding of how the nature and quality of social relationships relates to the use and evolution of communication is limited by a lack of directly comparable methods across multiple levels of analysis. Here, we analysed observational data from 111 wild groups belonging to 26 non-human primate species, to test how vocal communication relates to dominance style (the strictness with which a dominance hierarchy is enforced, ranging from 'despotic' to 'tolerant'). At the individual-level, we found that dominant individuals who were more tolerant vocalized at a higher rate than their despotic counterparts. This indicates that tolerance within a relationship may place pressure on the dominant partner to communicate more during social interactions. At the species-level, however, despotic species exhibited a larger repertoire of hierarchy-related vocalizations than their tolerant counterparts. Findings suggest primate signals are used and evolve in tandem with the nature of interactions that characterize individuals' social relationships.
ISSN
2054-5703
ORCID
van de Waal, Erica/0000-0001-7778-418X; Bergman, Thore/0000-0002-9615-5001; Ramos-Fernandez, Gabriel/0000-0001-7175-3905; Sosa-Lopez, J. Roberto/0000-0002-0120-0704; Bolt, Laura/0000-0002-8275-6543; Graham, Kirsty/0000-0002-7422-7676; Clay, Zanna/0000-0002-3016-1732; Micheletta, Jerome/0000-0002-4480-6781; Semple, Stuart/0000-0003-0452-8104; Zuberbuhler, Klaus/0000-0001-8378-088X
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.210873
Volume
8
Issue
7
License
UMass Amherst Open Access Policy
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Funder
NIA NIH HHSUnited States Department of Health & Human ServicesNational Institutes of Health (NIH) - USANIH National Institute on Aging (NIA) [R01 AG049395] Funding Source: Medline
Recommended Citation
Weyher, Anna H.; Kavanagh, Eithne; Street, Sally E.; Angwela, Felix O.; Bergman, Thore J.; Blaszczyk, Maryjka B.; Bolt, Laura M.; Briseño-Jaramillo, Margarita; Brown, Michelle; and Chen-Kraus, Chloe, "Dominance Style Is a Key Predictor of Vocal Use and Evolution Across Nonhuman Primates" (2021). Royal Society Open Science. 355.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.210873
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/anthro_faculty_pubs/355