Humans recognize emotional arousal in vocalizations across all classes of terrestrial vertebrates: evidence for acoustic universals
Humans recognize emotional arousal in vocalizations across all classes of terrestrial vertebrates: evidence for acoustic universals
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DOI：
10.1098/rspb.2017.0990
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发表时间：
2017-07-26
影响因子：
4.7
通讯作者：
Guentuerkuen, Onur
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Filippi, Piera;Congdon, Jenna V.;Guentuerkuen, Onur
世纪前，达尔文在文章中提出假设，人类通过声音表达情感的历史可以追溯到我们最早的陆地祖先。如果这个假设是正确的，我们应该期待在情感发声中发现跨物种的声学共性。研究表明，唤醒发声的声学属性在许多哺乳动物物种中是共享的，并且人类可以使用这些属性来推断情感内容。但这些声学特性是否延伸到非哺乳类脊椎动物？在这项研究中，我们要求人类参与者判断的情感内容的发声的九种脊椎动物代表三个不同的生物类-两栖类，爬行类（非鸟类和鸟类）和哺乳动物。我们发现，人类能够在所有物种的发声中识别出更高水平的唤醒。这一结果在不同的语言群体（英语、德语和汉语普通话母语者）中是一致的，表明这种能力在生物学上植根于人类。我们的研究结果表明，人类使用多个声学参数来推断每个物种的发声中的相对唤醒，但主要依靠基频和频谱重心来识别跨物种的更高唤醒发声。这些结果表明，声音的情感表达的基本机制是共享的脊椎动物，并可能代表一个同源的信号系统。
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.