ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2017
Humans recognize emotional arousal in vocalizations across all classes of terrestrial vertebrates: evidence for acoustic universals.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 61 papers.
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Who cites it
61 citing papers in PubMed.
- Dogs' reactions to motivations and emotions in conspecific and heterospecific vocalizations.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- A scoping review of music-based digital therapeutics for stress, anxiety, and depression.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Review
- Humans correctly assign emotional valence of rat vocalizations.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Human recognition of emotional valence and arousal of zoo animals.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Chronic State and Relationship to Humans Influence How Horses Decode Emotions in Human Voices: A Brain and Behavior Study.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Rough is salient: a conserved vocal niche to hijack the brain's salience system.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Emotions mediate nonlinear phenomena production in the vocalizations of two ape species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Machine learning algorithms can predict emotional valence across ungulate vocalizations.iScience · 2025Article
- Categorization and discrimination of human and non-human primate affective vocalizations: Investigation of frontal cortex activity through fNIRS.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, A Global Corpus of Vocal Music.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Emotion in Nonverbal Communication: Comparing Animal and Human Vocalizations and Human Text Messages.Emotion review : journal of the International Society for Research on Emotion · 2025Article
- Music Listening as Exploratory Behavior: From Dispositional Reactions to Epistemic Interactions with the Sonic World.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- People follow motivation-structural rules when they react to synthetised sounds.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Sounds like a fight: listeners can infer behavioural contexts from spontaneous nonverbal vocalisations.Cognition & emotion · 2024Article
- Humans can identify reward-related call types of chickens.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Biological principles for music and mental health.Translational psychiatry · 2023Review
- Universal interpretations of vocal music.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Concurrent and Prospective Associations Between Communicated Emotional Arousal and Adjustment Among Couples Coping With Cancer.Annals of behavioral medicine : a publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine · 2023Article
- Crocodile perception of distress in hominid baby cries.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
1 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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12 authors.
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Abstract
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.
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