Abstract
An original experiment by Pongrácz et al. (2005) showed that Hungarian listeners were able to categorize recordings of dog barks recorded in various contexts above chance level and assessed the barking dogs’ emotional state in accordance with these contexts. The present study sought to replicate this experiment in a Portuguese sample. Similar to Hungarians, Portuguese dog owners and non-owners rated the barks in accordance with their specific social contexts (e.g., a dog left alone is most probably in fearful state instead of a playful one), and correctly categorized territorial and separation barks above chance level. Similar error patterns were observed across subjects from the two countries. The Portuguese participants, however, were less successful in categorizing barks than the Hungarians. Additionally, results showed both sex and dog ownership effects. Women from both countries tended to attribute higher levels of despair to all bark recordings. Moreover, within the Portuguese sample, dog-owners were generally more accurate in categorizing the recordings than non-owners. Overall, the results of our replication study, besides supporting the universality of vocal emotion recognition in mammals, calls attention to the possibility of country/culture- and also individual-specific effects on human perception and understanding of nonhuman vocalizations.
Highlights
Affective communication, which means the signaling of the emotional state of the caller has a crucial role in social interactions across the animal kingdom
In line with the former Hungarian results, within the Portuguese sample, we found no effect of dogownership, neither as interactions nor as a main effect
Results show that human decoding of the emotional and contextual content of dog barks presents some level of cross-cultural robustness
Summary
Affective communication, which means the signaling of the emotional state of the caller has a crucial role in social interactions across the animal kingdom. The above studies suggest that humans’ ability to perceive emotions in dog barks and to extract context-specific information from these vocalizations may be shaped more by universal, cross-taxa acoustic coding and processing mechanisms that support emotional communication both within and across species, than by experience-dependent, higher-order cognitive processes. Recent evidence indicates that humans’ rate conspecific emotional vocalizations along basic acoustic rules and apply similar rules when processing dog vocalizations (Faragó et al, 2014) This would be in line with the idea that humans utilize similar mechanisms for recognizing con- and heterospecific vocal emotions (Andics et al, 2014). For example, might well differ across countries and cultures (Miura et al, 2000; Turcsán et al, 2012) and nothing is known of whether such differences may impact on human-dog emotional communication
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