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. 2014 Jan 8;10(1):20130926.
doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2013.0926. Print 2014 Jan.

Humans rely on the same rules to assess emotional valence and intensity in conspecific and dog vocalizations

Tamás Faragó  1 , Attila Andics, Viktor Devecseri, Anna Kis, Márta Gácsi, Adám Miklósi
Affiliations

Humans rely on the same rules to assess emotional valence and intensity in conspecific and dog vocalizations

Tamás Faragó et al. Biol Lett. .

Abstract

Humans excel at assessing conspecific emotional valence and intensity, based solely on non-verbal vocal bursts that are also common in other mammals. It is not known, however, whether human listeners rely on similar acoustic cues to assess emotional content in conspecific and heterospecific vocalizations, and which acoustical parameters affect their performance. Here, for the first time, we directly compared the emotional valence and intensity perception of dog and human non-verbal vocalizations. We revealed similar relationships between acoustic features and emotional valence and intensity ratings of human and dog vocalizations: those with shorter call lengths were rated as more positive, whereas those with a higher pitch were rated as more intense. Our findings demonstrate that humans rate conspecific emotional vocalizations along basic acoustic rules, and that they apply similar rules when processing dog vocal expressions. This suggests that humans may utilize similar mental mechanisms for recognizing human and heterospecific vocal emotions.

Keywords: dog; emotion intensity assessment; emotion valence assessment; human; non-verbal emotion expressions; vocal communication.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Two-dimensional response plane. x- and y-axes represent emotional valence and emotional intensity, respectively. The system projects the cursor's position to both axes (opaque area) to visually help the subjects to rate stimuli along both dimensions at the same time. The white X shows where the subject clicked to rate the actual sound. (Online version in colour.)
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
The linear relationships between acoustic parameters and emotional scales. Filled circles represent dog vocalizations, and open circles represent human vocalizations. The asterisks show significant relationship between the measures (*p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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