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What does that moo mean? Humans can make some emotional sense of barnyard babble - Science

If you want to know how your cat or dog is feeling, just listen. Happy kitties purr, angry pups growl. But can we extend the same insight to creatures that don’t share our homes: pigs or even wild animals?

A new study suggests we can—to a degree. A survey of more than 1000 people from across the globe finds most can pick up on an animal’s excitement, but not necessarily positive or negative emotions.

“It’s an exciting concept: Even though we’re so different, there is still commonality in the vocalizations,” says Jenna Congdon, an ethologist at Concordia University of Edmonton who was not involved with the study. “We’re not speaking the same language, but we’re able to understand very basic things.”

There are two parts to an animal’s emotional noises. The first is arousal, in which something exciting alters the duration, amplitude, or frequency of a certain sound. When agitated, a cow’s standard moo becomes a bellow as it increases in amplitude, for example. The second is valence—the positive or negative intonation of a certain sound. For example, the high-pitched squeal of a frightened pig sounds much different than the boisterous grunt of a happy hog.

Humans are experts at picking up on the arousal and valence of other humans, even if they come from a very different culture or speak another language. But scientists aren’t sure whether we can do the same with animals.

So in the new study, researchers at the University of Copenhagen obtained recordings of four domesticated mammals (pigs, horses, goats, and cows) and two of their wild relatives (wild boars and Przewalski’s horses, a critically endangered wild horse native to Mongolia). The recordings were made while the animals were experiencing certain emotions categorized as either positive, such as a horse readying to eat producing a high-pitched neigh, or negative, such as a hungry horse producing a throaty whine. The trial also included sound bites from human actors, who were recorded saying meaningless sounds in either an angry, fearful, or joyful tone.

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The throaty bellow of a cow expressing a negative emotionGreenall et al., Royal Society Open Science 2022

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The high-pitched neigh of a horse experiencing a positive emotionGreenall et al., Royal Society Open Science 2022

The team then sent the files and a survey to volunteers who responded to an advertisement circulated on social media, in magazines, and on a TV show. The participants hailed from 48 different countries and had the option to take the survey in eight different languages, including Italian, Dutch, and Hebrew. For each question, they compared two short snippets of vocalizations from a particular species and decided which clip represented a high or low arousal and which vocalization represented a positive or negative emotion.

The volunteers were able to accurately discern arousal in pigs, horses, and goats more than half of the time, the team reports today in Royal Society Open Science. The scores for emotional valence were more variable. The survey takers were able to differentiate positive from negative vocalizations in humans, goats, horses, pigs, and wild boars at an above average clip (correctly identifying positive vocalizations between 56% and 68% of the time), but they struggled to discern which emotions were being vocalized by the cows and wild horses (correctly identifying between only 33% to47%).

“People are very good at recognizing the vocalizations of horses, and very bad at recognizing others, such as cattle and Przewalski’s horses,” says study author Elodie Briefer, a behavioral ecologist at Copenhagen.

A participant’s sex had little impact on the accuracy of their answers. Instead, younger volunteers and those who had experience working with animals were better at picking up on both arousal and emotional valence.

The study suggests it may have been evolutionarily advantageous for a wide variety of animals to pick up on the emotional cues of other animals’ vocalizations—a long screech, for example, that may signal to multiple species that a predator is nearby.

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What does that moo mean? Humans can make some emotional sense of barnyard babble - Science
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