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Sometimes just listening to laughter compels listeners to laugh. Sometimes hearing a cry of terror directly imputes an instantaneous feeling of fear. Hearing someone weep can produce a feeling of sorrow and perhaps even cause one to cry. This suggests that some forms of vocal communication can elicit direct empathic sharing as Decety discusses in his chapter.

These forms of vocal communication can produce direct results in listeners without following a route of symbolic reference and interpretation.³ Language has typically been viewed as operating by the more symbolic route because of the linguistic claim that symbols are not the things they stand for and thus must be understood—words and sentences are not felt. However, the right insult or angry words delivered in the right way or the right praise seems to be felt directly, perhaps through the same kind of mechanisms by which empathic sharing occurs.

But how is this achieved? This kind of impact of language is not a result of understanding the content of speech. It reflects social goals and motives. To the extent that this kind of social impact may parallel empathic processes, we might find that similar mechanisms are involved. Some kind of resonance must be established between a speaker and hearer, and language can serve to establish this resonance and lead to subsequent action by the hearer. This idea of a resonance in an audience does seem more compatible with the effects of vocal behavior such as laughter or crying on a listener than the symbolic interpretative view. This notion of resonance may also be useful in understanding other kinds of language impact from the fiery sermon of Edwards to the passionate speeches of Obama and Kennedy and King.

In listening to speech that has impact, language has created a state in the listener that reflects the intention of the speaker. Whether it is fear or connection, somehow language can operate as the medium by which social and emotional psychological states get transmitted to an audience. But how does this impact get created in the social brain?

Language impact in the social brain

Understanding spoken language has typically been viewed as an analytic process in which sound patterns are translated into linguistic symbols by the brain. However, an alternative theory is that we understand spoken language by using our motor system to simulate what might have been said. The idea is that trying to mentally produce the speech internally (without talking) might help us understand what is said, when speech is not clear. However, this theory did not have much neural plausibility. People do not generally move their mouths overtly or even covertly while listening.

The discovery of mirror neurons, examined at greater length by Steve Small in the next chapter, suggested one kind of mechanism that might instantiate this kind of process. In certain parts of the brain, involved in the control of action, some neurons that respond when making certain actions also respond when observing the same actions. This led to the inference that these neurons are involved in understanding the behavior of other people. The reasoning is simply that neural activity in the observer’s motor system that results when seeing a behavior essentially establishes the brain state that would

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