If you’ve ever cared for a dog, you’ve learned that it’s easy to guess whether your pet is excited, scared or happy, just from the sounds he or she makes. Instinct might tell us that we can guess the emotions behind human sounds in the same way; but surprisingly, no scientific study has actually compared the ways in which these two species' vocalizations convey emotion---until now. In October 2013, a team led by Tamás Faragó at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary set out to compare human emotional responses to nonverbal sound cues. They began by gathering 200 recordings of vocalizations---some from dogs; others from humans---whose length, tone and intensity seemed to convey a variety of emotional states. The team then recruited 39 volunteers, and played them the 200 nonverbal vocalizations in random order. Using a scale
originally developed by the psychologist James Russell, the participants rated each vocalization’s emotional ...
