Empathetic People Seem to Have A Special Ability When It Comes to Animals

Is it possible to tell if a hoofed animal is happy or distressed by its noises? It could be a sign that you spend a lot of time with animals.

A study led by an ethologist found that people who had higher empathy scores were better at identifying animal emotions.

Briefer published an investigation earlier this year that supported the idea that animals hear and respond to our own voices.

Briefer and her team recorded vocalizations from domestic and wild animals.

Positive experiences associated with some of the recordings include an animal anticipating food and being with a friend.

Other noises were made when the animal was scared.

The heart rate of the domestic animals and the movements of the wild animals were used to measure how emotional the sound was.

The voices of humans were included in the mix. The actors were hired to say the meaningless words in their voices.

There are two sounds from the same animal, one with low arousal and one with high arousal.

The people were asked to fill out an empathy questionnaire.

A person's tendency to adopt other people's points of view, feel sympathy for others, and imagine themselves in fictional situations are measured by this index.

Random chance is not as good as people correctly interpreting the meaning of animal sounds more than 50% of the time.

The level of emotion in animals is different from the level of emotion in people. The senior author on the study said that arousal is a stress response that is conserved through evolution in mammals.

The ability to interpret animal noises is not affected by gender or education level, but by the age of the person.

Humans were more familiar with the sounds of other people and animals than wild animals. People who worked closely with animals were better at understanding them.

People who scored high for compassion were better able to understand the meaning of the sounds of animals.

Another study found that humans who had more compassion for cats were better at distinguishing between positive and negative experiences.

It is possible to train people to better understand the emotional lives of animals.

Students who take the test in class get an average of 50 percent of the correct answers.

They get better after we talk about the sounds and knowledge we have about animal vocalizations. They usually get over 70 percent correct on their second try.

All mammals have a similar emotional system.

The paper was published in an open science journal.