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Humans read emotional arousal in monkey vocalizations: evidence for evolutionary continuities in communication

Humans and other mammalian species communicate emotions in ways that reflect evolutionary conservation and continuity, an observation first made by Darwin. One approach to testing this hypothesis has been to assess the capacity to perceive the emotional content of the vocalizations of other species....

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Autores principales: Schwartz, Jay W., Gouzoules, Harold
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9744152/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36518288
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.14471
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author Schwartz, Jay W.
Gouzoules, Harold
author_facet Schwartz, Jay W.
Gouzoules, Harold
author_sort Schwartz, Jay W.
collection PubMed
description Humans and other mammalian species communicate emotions in ways that reflect evolutionary conservation and continuity, an observation first made by Darwin. One approach to testing this hypothesis has been to assess the capacity to perceive the emotional content of the vocalizations of other species. Using a binary forced choice task, we tested perception of the emotional intensity represented in coos and screams of infant and juvenile female rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) by 113 human listeners without, and 12 listeners with, experience (as researchers or care technicians) with this species. Each stimulus pair contained one high- and one low-arousal vocalization, as measured at the time of recording by stress hormone levels for coos and the degree of intensity of aggression for screams. For coos as well as screams, both inexperienced and experienced participants accurately identified the high-arousal vocalization at significantly above-chance rates. Experience was associated with significantly greater accuracy with scream stimuli but not coo stimuli, and with a tendency to indicate screams as reflecting greater emotional intensity than coos. Neither measures of empathy, human emotion recognition, nor attitudes toward animal welfare showed any relationship with responses. Participants were sensitive to the fundamental frequency, noisiness, and duration of vocalizations; some of these tendencies likely facilitated accurate perceptions, perhaps due to evolutionary homologies in the physiology of arousal and vocal production between humans and macaques. Overall, our findings support a view of evolutionary continuity in emotional vocal communication. We discuss hypotheses about how distinctive dimensions of human nonverbal communication, like the expansion of scream usage across a range of contexts, might influence perceptions of other species’ vocalizations.
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spelling pubmed-97441522022-12-13 Humans read emotional arousal in monkey vocalizations: evidence for evolutionary continuities in communication Schwartz, Jay W. Gouzoules, Harold PeerJ Animal Behavior Humans and other mammalian species communicate emotions in ways that reflect evolutionary conservation and continuity, an observation first made by Darwin. One approach to testing this hypothesis has been to assess the capacity to perceive the emotional content of the vocalizations of other species. Using a binary forced choice task, we tested perception of the emotional intensity represented in coos and screams of infant and juvenile female rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) by 113 human listeners without, and 12 listeners with, experience (as researchers or care technicians) with this species. Each stimulus pair contained one high- and one low-arousal vocalization, as measured at the time of recording by stress hormone levels for coos and the degree of intensity of aggression for screams. For coos as well as screams, both inexperienced and experienced participants accurately identified the high-arousal vocalization at significantly above-chance rates. Experience was associated with significantly greater accuracy with scream stimuli but not coo stimuli, and with a tendency to indicate screams as reflecting greater emotional intensity than coos. Neither measures of empathy, human emotion recognition, nor attitudes toward animal welfare showed any relationship with responses. Participants were sensitive to the fundamental frequency, noisiness, and duration of vocalizations; some of these tendencies likely facilitated accurate perceptions, perhaps due to evolutionary homologies in the physiology of arousal and vocal production between humans and macaques. Overall, our findings support a view of evolutionary continuity in emotional vocal communication. We discuss hypotheses about how distinctive dimensions of human nonverbal communication, like the expansion of scream usage across a range of contexts, might influence perceptions of other species’ vocalizations. PeerJ Inc. 2022-12-01 /pmc/articles/PMC9744152/ /pubmed/36518288 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.14471 Text en © 2022 Schwartz and Gouzoules https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Animal Behavior
Schwartz, Jay W.
Gouzoules, Harold
Humans read emotional arousal in monkey vocalizations: evidence for evolutionary continuities in communication
title Humans read emotional arousal in monkey vocalizations: evidence for evolutionary continuities in communication
title_full Humans read emotional arousal in monkey vocalizations: evidence for evolutionary continuities in communication
title_fullStr Humans read emotional arousal in monkey vocalizations: evidence for evolutionary continuities in communication
title_full_unstemmed Humans read emotional arousal in monkey vocalizations: evidence for evolutionary continuities in communication
title_short Humans read emotional arousal in monkey vocalizations: evidence for evolutionary continuities in communication
title_sort humans read emotional arousal in monkey vocalizations: evidence for evolutionary continuities in communication
topic Animal Behavior
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9744152/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36518288
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.14471
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