Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences and Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (CISA), Campus Biotech, University of Geneva, Chemin des Mines 9, 1202, Geneva, Switzerland.
Department of Psychology, University of York, York, UK.
Sci Rep. 2023 Jul 5;13(1):10900. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-37558-3.
Humans are adept at extracting affective information from vocalizations of humans and other animals. However, the extent to which human recognition of vocal affective cues of other species is due to cross-taxa similarities in acoustic parameters or the phylogenetic closeness between species is currently unclear. To address this, we first analyzed acoustic variation in 96 affective vocalizations, taken from agonistic and affiliative contexts, of humans and three other primates-rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), chimpanzees and bonobos (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus). Acoustic analyses revealed that agonistic chimpanzee and bonobo vocalizations were similarly distant from agonistic human voices, but chimpanzee affiliative vocalizations were significantly closer to human affiliative vocalizations, than those of bonobos, indicating a potential derived vocal evolution in the bonobo lineage. Second, we asked 68 human participants to categorize and also discriminate vocalizations based on their presumed affective content. Results showed that participants reliably categorized human and chimpanzee vocalizations according to affective content, but not bonobo threat vocalizations nor any macaque vocalizations. Participants discriminated all species calls above chance level except for threat calls by bonobos and macaques. Our results highlight the importance of both phylogenetic and acoustic parameter level explanations in cross-species affective perception, drawing a more complex picture to the origin of vocal emotions.
人类善于从人类和其他动物的发声中提取情感信息。然而，目前尚不清楚人类对其他物种发声情感线索的识别是由于跨物种声学参数的相似性还是物种之间的亲缘关系。为了解决这个问题，我们首先分析了 96 种来自人类和三种其他灵长类动物（猕猴、黑猩猩和倭黑猩猩）的求偶和社交发声的声学变化。声学分析表明，求偶的黑猩猩和倭黑猩猩的发声与求偶的人类声音相似，但黑猩猩的社交发声与人类的社交发声更为相似，而不是与倭黑猩猩的相似，这表明倭黑猩猩的谱系中可能存在衍生的发声进化。其次，我们要求 68 名人类参与者根据其假定的情感内容对发声进行分类和区分。结果表明，参与者能够根据情感内容可靠地对人类和黑猩猩的发声进行分类，但不能对倭黑猩猩的威胁发声或任何猕猴的发声进行分类。参与者能够区分所有物种的叫声，除了倭黑猩猩和猕猴的威胁叫声。我们的研究结果强调了在跨物种情感感知中，种系发生和声学参数水平解释的重要性，为发声情感的起源描绘了一幅更为复杂的图景。
