Emotional Responses to Sounds (10-24-23)
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’).