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Humans recognize emotional arousal in vocalizations across all classes of terrestrial vertebrates: Evidence for acoustic universals
- Source :
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Royal Society, The, 2017, 284 (1859), pp.20170990. ⟨10.1098/rspb.2017.0990⟩, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2017, 284 (1859), pp.20170990. ⟨10.1098/rspb.2017.0990⟩
- Publication Year :
- 2017
-
Abstract
- International audience; Writing over a century ago, Darwin hypothesized that vocal expression of emotion dates back to our earliest terrestrial ancestors. If this hypothesis is true, we should expect to find cross-species acoustic universals in emotional vocalizations. Studies suggest that acoustic attributes of aroused vocalizations are shared across many mammalian species, and that humans can use these attributes to infer emotional content. But do these acoustic attributes extend to non-mammalian vertebrates? In this study, we asked human participants to judge the emotional content of vocalizations of nine vertebrate species representing three different biological classes—Amphibia, Reptilia (non-aves and aves) and Mammalia. We found that humans are able to identify higher levels of arousal in vocalizations across all species. This result was consistent across different language groups (English, German and Mandarin native speakers), suggesting that this ability is biologically rooted in humans. Our findings indicate that humans use multiple acoustic parameters to infer relative arousal in vocalizations for each species, but mainly rely on fundamental frequency and spectral centre of gravity to identify higher arousal vocalizations across species. These results suggest that fundamental mechanisms of vocal emotional expression are shared among vertebrates and could represent a homologous signalling system.
- Subjects :
- 0106 biological sciences
Evolution
Emotions
Signalling system
[SHS.PSY]Humanities and Social Sciences/Psychology
010603 evolutionary biology
01 natural sciences
Mandarin Chinese
General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
Arousal
biology.animal
[SDV.BA.ZV]Life Sciences [q-bio]/Animal biology/Vertebrate Zoology
otorhinolaryngologic diseases
Animals
Humans
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
Emotional expression
050102 behavioral science & comparative psychology
Language
General Environmental Science
Communication
General Immunology and Microbiology
biology
business.industry
05 social sciences
Vertebrate
Acoustics
General Medicine
Problem of universals
language.human_language
Emotional prosody
Vertebrates
language
Vocalization, Animal
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
business
Emotional arousal
Psychology
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 09628452 and 14712954
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Royal Society, The, 2017, 284 (1859), pp.20170990. ⟨10.1098/rspb.2017.0990⟩, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2017, 284 (1859), pp.20170990. ⟨10.1098/rspb.2017.0990⟩
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....5895f6535e6839d29de216703df1eb45