Emotion and Animal Calls – The Importance of Vocal Pitch

What is it about?

People can accurately interpret the emotions expressed by animal calls, but how--which acoustic features do we key into? In this study, humans heard pitch-modified versions of calls from diverse species, including monkeys, cats, seals, ravens, frogs, and crickets. Listeners attributed more intense emotions to higher-pitched calls, across all those animals, independent of experience. Relying on vocal pitch probably helps people accurately perceive emotions in mammals, but might mislead our perception of evolutionarily distant animals.

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Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We interact with animals all the time, so it's important to know what biases guide our interpretations of animal behavior. This study suggests that we tend to use a simple rule of thumb - "higher pitched calls mean a more intense emotion" - to guide our perceptions of animals. It would be more accurate to apply this rule more to animals that are closely related to us, like mammals, but our results suggested that we don't alter this rule based on evolutionary distance. Instead we perceive emotion from distantly related animals as though they were mammals--a tendency that could have implications for our treatment of other species.

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