Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Study: We Use “Baby Talk” With Our Dogs But Not Baby Faces

“Who’s so cute? Yes you are. You’re so cute, aren’t you?” Baby talk sounds pretty similar whether we’re cooing to babies or our dogs.

In fact, research has even suggested that dogs’ brains are sensitive to the familiar high-pitched “cute” voice tone that adult humans (especially women) use to talk to babies.

But an interesting new study entitled “The face behind the caring voice: A comparative study on facial prosodic features of dog-, infant- and adult-directed communication” has has spotted a crucial difference:

When baby talking to infants, our faces tend to be overly expressive—wide-open eyes, high eyebrows, and exaggerated smiles. With dogs, we’re far more stoic, researchers report in a new study in Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

Dogs and Baby Talk

Scientists have been studying baby talk with dogs (and more recently, cats) for more than 40 years. In fact research has found similarities between infant and dog brains during the processing of speech with such a high-pitched tone feature.

But little work has been done on the facial expressions that go along with the baby talk.

Anna Gergely, an evolutionary biologist and dog owner wondered whether there might be differences between how we coo to our fur babies and our human ones. So she designed a study to answer that question.

Dog Study Methodology

In the new study, Gergely and her colleagues recruited 23 Hungarian couples who had both a baby between 6 months and 18 months old and a pet dog.

While visiting the families in their homes, the researchers asked the parents to speak three short monologues individually to the dog, the baby, and the other parent.

The monologues involved things like teaching a new word, reciting a nursery rhyme, or reading a script of everyday sentences such as, “What nice weather!”

Gergely and her colleagues filmed the parents’ faces while they were speaking to their partner, pet and infant. Later, the researchers used “face-reading” software to analyze the parents’ facial expressions and muscle movements.

Dog Study Results

Gergely’s study suggested that the parents’ faces were the most intensely expressive—with more exaggerated expressions—when talking to their babies, especially when reciting the nursery rhyme and scripted sentences.

The facial expression recognition software ranked their expressions as particularly happy and often evoking surprise, Gergely says.

By contrast, participants had the least amount of facial muscle movement and the most neutral expressions when they were talking to their dogs—even though they seemed to be using a voice nearly identical to what they used with their babies.

Dr. Matsumoto’s Thoughts

Dr. Matsumoto thinks it is far fetched to suggest that humans talking to dogs know or have memorialized different meanings of faces in the animal kingdom.

Instead he suggests that there are many possible reasons why humans may be more expressive with infants than with their canine companions.

Here are a few:

1. When humans talking to infants they are even more animated, which requires additional signaling. In turn, this additional signaling recruits more behaviors, including faces. Another difference not discussed is that human – infant signaling is stronger, i.e., more intense.

2. Humans unconsciously speak animatedly for infants to learn about how to read facial expressions. This is less important for other animals.

3. Infants can verbalize many different emotional states, and can thus refer to them in their facial expressions. Infants will learn about multiple states and their links to language. This is less important and not required for animals.

What do you think about the possibilities Dr. Matsumoto outlined above? Which do you think is most plausible?

The post Study: We Use “Baby Talk” With Our Dogs But Not Baby Faces first appeared on Humintell.

What’s The Difference Between Basic and Primary Emotions?

Primary Emotions vs Basic Emotions

Many people don’t distinguish between primary and basic emotions to categorize different types of emotions. In fact, some scientists do not distinguish between them either.

You may know of a well known emotion theory by a psychologist named Robert Pluchik.

Pluchik had a well known emotion wheel where he described emotions. He termed emotions primary but he also referred to them as basic.

Paul Ekman and other scientists talked about basic emotions, but not necessarily primary emotions.

Many people interchange the two terms and interchanging occurs across different scholars and writers.

Basic Emotions: Elemental Emotions

Dr. Matsumoto prefers to use the term “basic” to refer to “basic emotions” because the term “basic” refers to those emotions that can be considered elemental.

That is, basic emotions are the most rudimentary set of emotions that exist in humans.

Dr. Matsumoto also likes the term “basic emotions” because if you consider them to include elemental or rudimentary set of emotions, they allow one to consider how they can combine with other emotions.

In addition, basic emotions can combine with cognitions or contexts to produce other emotional experiences that we have in human life and that we label in language.

For example, extreme sadness when experienced at a death of a loved on or a funeral may be called grief or mourning. Anger and sadness that occur when we perceive one of our loved one as coveted by someone else may be called jealousy.

In this way, having a concept called “basic emotions” allow us to consider how other somewhat more complex emotional states and experiences that are actually mapped in language can be produced when they combine with other emotions or other cognitions or other contexts.

Basic emotions they refer to an elemental set of emotions that allow us to think about how those emotions are used in combination with other emotions, cognitions or contexts to map our emotional life in language.

It is important to note that different scholars have different specific emotions in whatever list they consider basic and we have a separate blog about that.

Primary and Secondary Emotions: Refer to Sequence

Dr. Matsumoto prefers to use he term primary emotions to refer to sequence because the word primary has a sequential or temporal aspect to it. That is, primary emotions refer to emotions that occur in a sequence.

Primary emotions refer to the first or initial emotional reactions that a person can have that is triggered in a certain situation.

When thought about in this way, this gives rise to the thought of secondary emotions (emotions that occur next after the primary emotion in a sequence).

Secondary emotions are really interesting to think about because sometimes these emotions may be in relation to the context.

For example, judo athletes may go from sadness about a loss to anger or vice versa. So the initial emotion (sadness) would be the primary emotion and the secondary (anger) would be the secondary emotion.

Secondary Emotions: Reactions about Reactions

Another type of secondary emotion are emotions that we have about the initial emotional reaction (reactions about reactions).

For example, some people like the fact that they get afraid. You may know them as sensation seekers- those that like seeing horror movies or go bungee jumping.

Some people are happy about being happy; their secondary emotion to happiness is happiness. These people may be  pleasant to be around.

Some other people may like being angry so they’re probably not as nice to be around.

But Dr. M’s main point here is that he thinks of primary and secondary emotions is referring to a temporal sequence rather than compared to basic emotions which refer to an elemental or rudimentary set of emotions.

 

The post What’s The Difference Between Basic and Primary Emotions? first appeared on Humintell.

How Does Music Affect Our Emotions? A Cross-Cultural Study

Emotions from Music

Most people know the power of music and the emotions music can invoke. Listen to a happy song with an upbeat tone and you may find yourself tapping your feet. Listen to a sad song and it may bring tears to your eyes.

In fact, research has shown that music can activate our autonomic nervous system and even cause shivers down the spine.

A fascinating new study also suggests that music’s power to unify emotions and movements may have played a role in human evolution, fostering social bonds and community.

Music and Emotion Research

The recent music and emotion research study out of Turku PET Center in Finland reveals that music’s emotional impact transcends cultures, evoking similar bodily sensations around the world.

Researchers found that happy music energizes arms and legs, while sad tunes resonate in the chest.

Credit: Lauri Nummenmaa, University of Turku

The results of the study entitled “Bodily maps of musical sensations across cultures” were on 25 January 2024 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This cross-cultural study had a total of 1,500 participants who completed an online survey.

Western and Asian participants rated the emotions and bodily sensations evoked by Western and Asian songs.

The emotions and bodily sensations evoked by music were similar across Western and Asian listeners. The bodily sensations were also linked with the music-induced emotions.

“Certain acoustic features of music were associated with similar emotions in both Western and Asian listeners. Music with a clear beat was found happy and danceable while dissonance in music was associated with aggressiveness. Since these sensations are similar across different cultures, music-induced emotions are likely independent of culture and learning and based on inherited biological mechanisms,” says Professor Lauri Nummenmaa.

Similar to universal facial expressions of emotion, this recent musical study suggests that music’s influence on the body is universal across cultures. It also suggests people moving to music in all cultures and synchronized postures, movements and vocalizations is a universal sign for affiliation.

The researchers suggest that music may have emerged during the evolution of human species to promote social interaction and sense of community by synchronizing the bodies and emotions of the listeners.

Universal Emotions in Music

The idea that music produces universal emotional responses has been studied before.

Research led by Eline Adrianne Smit and colleagues from the MARCS Institute for Brain suggests certain elements of music are hard-wired into the human central nervous system.

Smit and colleagues asked musicians and non-musicians in Sydney, Australia as well as different communities from Papua New Guinea with varying degrees of exposure to Western music, to associate major and minor melodies with either happiness or sadness.

The researchers found that the degree of familiarity with Western music corresponded with the association between major melodies with happiness, and minor melodies with sadness.

 

 

This study suggests that familiarity through cultural exposure plays and important factor when associating major and minor melodies with happiness and sadness respectively.

Interestingly, major chords tend to appear more frequently than minor chords in popular music and research shows that humans are likely to attribute positive emotions to things that we are familiar with.

The post How Does Music Affect Our Emotions? A Cross-Cultural Study first appeared on Humintell.