Schwartz, Pierson, and Reece’s work directly relates to animal sounds but can potentially be extended to other contexts. The researchers found that “A growing body of research demonstrates that humans can accurately perceive the emotional states of animals solely by listening to their calls, highlighting shared evolutionary ancestry. . . . One hypothesis is that humans rely on simple acoustic heuristics to make such judgments, for example, perceiving higher-pitched calls as reflecting heightened emotional arousal (the ‘pitch rule’). This could lead to accurate judgments of emotion since in most mammals, as in humans, vocal fundamental frequency (the acoustic determinant of the pitch percept) does objectively correlate with emotional arousal. In the present study, we used digital pitch manipulation to create pairs of animal calls that were perceptually identical except for pitch, and we measured human perceptions of the caller’s emotional arousal using an online survey. Calls of six phylogenetically diverse species were included as stimuli. Participants attributed slightly but statistically significantly higher arousal to higher-pitched versions of the same calls.”
Jay Schwartz, Kayleigh Pierson, and Alexander Reece. “Pitch Affects Human (Homo Sapiens) Perceptions of Emotional Arousal from Diverse Animal Calls.” Journal of Comparative Psychology, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/com0000366