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We review literature linking patterns of vocal accommodation in the paraverbal range of the voice to small group structures of status and dominance. We provide a thorough overview of the current state of vocal accommodation research, tracing the development of the model from its early focus on patterns of mutual vocal adaptation, to the current focus on structural factors producing patterns of unequal accommodation between group members. We also highlight gaps in existing knowledge and opportunities to contribute to the development of vocal accommodation as an unobtrusive, nonconscious measure of small group hierarchies.

We trace the empirical development of vocal accommodation as a measure of status and power, and discuss connections between vocal accommodation and two prominent theoretical frameworks: communication accommodation theory (CAT) and expectation states theory. We also provide readers with a guide for collecting and analyzing vocal data and for calculating two related measures of vocal accommodation.

Across multiple studies, vocal accommodation significantly predicts observers’ perceptions regarding interactants engaged in debates and interviews. Studies have specifically linked vocal accommodation to perceptions of relative power or dominance, but have not shown a relationship between accommodation and perceptions of prestige.

Vocal accommodation measures have clear applications for measuring and modeling group dynamics. More work is needed to understand how accommodation functions in clearly-defined status situations, how the magnitude of status differences affects the degree of accommodation inequality, and how vocal accommodation is related to other correlates of social status, including openness to influence and contributions to group tasks.

This study examines whether there are unintended consequences that emerge from status interventions in task groups in relation to cohesion and solidarity. Past theorists have argued that inconsistent status structures produce weaker levels of cohesion and solidarity in comparison to consistent status structures.

Data come from an online experiment involving mixed-sex dyads interacting in one of three conditions. Participants individually completed an ambiguous problem-solving task and then worked together over Zoom audio to form a group decision. In the three conditions, participants were either given no performance feedback before the problem-solving task or were informed the male or the female participant performed better on a pretest related to the task. The conversations were recorded and analyzed using measures related to paraverbal synchronization and accommodation.

In terms of self-reported cohesion, there appeared to be a difference, albeit a weak one, in only the inconsistent-status condition, with female participants reporting higher levels of cohesion in comparison to males. However, in terms of solidarity, there was no significant difference between the conditions.

Although inconsistent status structures were associated with weaker perceptions of cohesion, it did not appear to impact solidarity like theorists have suggested. Status structures do not appear to impact group solidarity.

The nature of group membership in conjunction with status consistency/inconsistency may produce the significant differences in solidarity that theorists have suggested.

To date, there has been little empirical examination of how status consistency affects cohesion and solidarity. Relatedly, the current study advances the research on vocal accommodation by analyzing status and solidarity simultaneously.

Second-order expectations refer to an actor's beliefs about what a co-actor believes with respect to their relative abilities on a shared task. The authors describe and compare three alternative programs of research that explain the effects of second-order expectations on behavioral inequalities in task groups. The authors’ overall goal is to work toward improving the precision and generality of theories of second-order expectations.

The authors conduct a thorough review of theory and research on each of the three alternative models of second-order expectations. In so doing, they highlight areas of convergence and divergence in terms of theory, method, and empirical support. They also suggest research designs that can help clarify the effects of second-order expectations in task groups and adjudicate among the models.

New empirical studies are needed that attempt to replicate findings across the three approaches to modeling second-order expectations. In addition, the three approaches need to be directly compared at the same time using a shared experimental design and the same participant population.

This is the first effort to systematically and critically compare and contrast three competing models of second-order expectations in structural social psychology. The authors offer a number of original, specific recommendations for future research.

Status characteristics theory states that influence in small groups reflects the distribution of group members' status characteristics. This process is mediated by expectations for task performance. Vocal accommodation is an unobtrusive measure that indicates expectations. We test whether vocal accommodation predicts influence and then examine the role of expectations in this process.

We conducted a laboratory experiment in which status-differ-entiated dyads completed a collective problem-solving task. We use a common measure of vocal accommodation to predict influence, and we employ questionnaire data to measure performance expectations. We hypothesize that the actor that exerts more effort in the synchronization process will have less influence over group decisions and that performance expectations will mediate the effect.

Results from GSEM analyses of 65 dyads show that levels of vocal accommodation significantly predict influence. Further analysis shows that performance expectations mediate a significant portion of the relationship between AAR and influence.

Vocal accommodation is useful for predicting both status perceptions and influence. Since this technique is an unobtrusive measure, it presents new possibilities for status research, including opening new lines of theoretical inquiry, providing a tool for conducting replications outside of the standard experimental setting, and for examining status organizing processes in a variety of environments.

We present a novel method for examining status outcomes, including a measure of influence that is analogous to existing measures that status scholars use but which is more suitable for studying status processes in open interaction.

We survey and organize over fifty years of theoretical research on status and expectation state processes. After defining some key terms in this theoretical approach, we briefly describe theories and branches in the program.

We also focus on a few theories that illustrate distinct patterns of theory growth, using them to show the variety of ways in which the research program has grown.

The program structure developed from a single set of theories on development and maintenance of group inequality in the 1960s to six interrelated branches by 1988. Between 1988 and today, the overall structure has grown to total 19 different branches. We briefly describe each branch, identifying over 200 resources for the further study of these branches.

Although the various branches share key concepts and processes, they have been developed by different researchers, in a variety of settings from laboratories to schools to business organizations. Second, we outline some important issues for further research in some of the branches. Third, we emphasize the value of developing new research methods for testing and applying the theories.

These theories have been used to explain phenomena of gender, racial, and ethnic inequality among others, and for understanding some cases of personality attributions, deviance and control processes, and application of double standards in hiring.

Status and expectation state processes often operate to produce invidious social inequalities. Understanding these processes can enable social scientists to devise more effective interventions to reduce these inequalities.

Status and expectation state processes occupy a significant segment of research into group processes. This chapter provides an authoritative overview of ideas in the program, what is known, and what remains to be discovered.

Purpose – In recent decades, some sociologists have turned to evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science to support, modify, and reconfigure existing social psychological theory. In this chapter, we build on this momentum by considering the relevance of current work in affective and cognitive neuroscience for understanding emotions and the self. Our principal aim is to enlarge the range of phenomena currently considered by sociologists who study emotion while showing how affective dynamics play an important role across most outcomes and processes of interest to social scientists.

Approach – We focus on the ways external social objects become essential to, and emotionally significant for, the self. To that end, we draw on ideas from phenomenology, pragmatism, classic symbolic interactionism, and dramaturgy. We show how basic affective systems graft on, build from, and extend current social psychological usages of emotions as well as the important sociological work being done on self, from both symbolic interactionist (SI) and identity theory (IT) perspectives. Finally, we turn to the promising directions in studying emotional biographies and various aspects related to embodiment.

Findings – Affective systems consist of brain networks whose connections deepen when activated, with interesting variations observable at the neural, individual, and social levels in which one or more system is more salient than others. Affective systems may come to saturate the construction and maintenance of an autobiography or collective biography, with consequences for self-projection, self-other attunement, and embodied action. In turning to embodiment, however, we consider aspects of cognitive neuroscience that can contribute to ongoing work in neurosociology building on symbolic interactionism.

Practical Implications – The focus on affective systems suggests new research agendas in leveraging emerging neurosociological methods in the laboratory, while pushing for novel, naturalistic observational strategies. The latter, in particular, may be key to deepening sociology's contributions to neuroscience, better positioned to bring the full disciplinary toolkit to bear on these questions.

Social Implications – In considering the embodied and projective aspects of the self, we show how work examining convergence and divergence between embodied and linguistic pathways opens up new insights into how the self develops or acquires behavioral repertoires. As such, this chapter points to the need for holistic approach to understanding the social actor and, thereby, how political, economic, historical, and cultural factors shape self as much as biogenetic and psychological.

Originality of the Chapter – Sociologists think of emotions as either dependent or intervening variables: (1) signaling identity or situational incongruence, (2) states to be managed, and (3) structural dimensions of superordinate–subordinate relationships. Our integration of the theory of affective systems emphasizes the causal primacy emotions have over other behavioral and cognitive functions, clarifying how they play into the construction and maintenance of self and social experience.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how biosociologists can further the understanding of Autism Spectrum Disorders by combining neurology's knowledge of the brain with social scientific knowledge about paraverbal communication and interactional synchrony.

Findings – We theoretically analyze Autism Spectrum Disorders through the lens of neurosociology and develop a research agenda centered on relationships among brain function, interactional symmetry, and autism. We also derive an intervention model involving the artificial manipulation of speech communication. In our analysis we draw attention to multidisciplinary research on vocal and behavioral synchrony and demonstrate how this knowledge contributes to a neurosociological understanding of autism.

Research limitations/implications – We synthesize diverse programs of research from multiple fields and innovate a neurosociological approach to understanding biosocial interaction rituals in relation to autism. We discuss the potential use of “dichotic filtration” of speech to enhance communication efficacy for individuals with autism.

Practical implications – Our arguments suggest that the social difficulties faced by individuals with autism may be rooted in problems associated with the cerebral processing of paralanguage. As a potential remedy for these problems, we suggest an intervention method based on recent technological advancements stemming from decades of theoretical and empirical research.

Social implications – To the extent that the proposed intervention model proves successful, it will enhance the lives of individuals with autism and those with whom they interact by improving social communication and associated channels for creating social bonds.

Originality/value – This work is uniquely important as an example of how biosociologists might move “from bench to application” in the context of a cumulative program of interdisciplinary research, development, and technology transfer.

Status characteristics and status cues theories posit that those with highly valued status attributes are expected to be more competent and influential than their lower status/skilled task partners. With a focus on beauty and a task cue we term “working smart,” our aim was to specify the combined attributes that led certain women to attain higher status than their female, dyadic task partners.

Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), we reanalyzed data from a published study about the impact of women's beauty on a paraverbal measure of status. The approach determines how combined conditions, such as being attractive and task efficient, explain an outcome, such as a status difference, between partners. QCA was paired with qualitative coding of interactants' speech to further interrogate the data.

More task-efficient women always attained higher status than their partners, yet a status difference was stronger if the more efficient partner was beautiful. Although gendered deviance was found to lower women's relative status, it does not constitute a status violation.

Social and Research Implications: Variants of expectation states theory are supported based on our unique QCA approach. Applying QCA as a triangulation tool to evaluate the validity of past findings is a novel usage. Social psychology benefits from QCA's ability to treat micro-level data.

“Working smart” was always associated with higher relative social status but not always beauty or task ability. After 50 years, the “what is beautiful is good” thesis continues to be supported and expanded to “what is beautiful works smarter.”

To use a behavioral measure of legitimacy to study how differences in negotiating style and status affect the legitimacy of persons in high-power network positions. Predictions include (1) that powerful network actors who negotiate using a pro-group style will maintain legitimacy better than will those who negotiate selfishly and (2) those higher in status will be granted more legitimacy both before and after exchange than powerful actors lower in status.

An experimental study in which participants were connected in networks to powerful partners who were portrayed as consistently high or low on several status characteristics. Both before and after exchange, participants evaluated partners on a number of dimensions and made decisions on whether to vote to join a coalition to take the partner's power away, a direct behavioral indicator of legitimacy.

High-power partners lost legitimacy over the course of exchange irrespective of whether they negotiated in pro-group or selfish ways, and irrespective of whether they were high or low in status. This effect was pronounced for partners who negotiated selfishly. Although partner status predicted legitimacy prior to exchange, legitimacy evaluations after exchange appeared entirely driven by the partner's negotiating style (how the power was used) and not by status.

The project introduces a new behavioral measure of legitimacy that correlated highly with self-report items and should be of value in future research. The study also indicates promising directions for future research that might disentangle effects of power and status on legitimacy, along with adjudicating among explanations for why this study did not find status effects on legitimacy.