Dr. Jay W Schwartz

Hey y'all! Ever wonder how we humans perceive emotion from animal calls? Then have I got a new study for you - and it's being featured at @growkudos! We showed that people are influenced by vocal pitch regardless of experience and evolutionary distance. growkudos.com/publications/1…

For all its flaws, twitter has been an awesome hub for citizen science. With that said, are you willing to take 15 minutes to participate in our study of human perception of cat sounds FOR SCIENCE?! All you need is a computer and headphones! tinyurl.com/yrmaa3dn

@JJRP3 Entirely understandable, haha. Here's a neat one: tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.108…

@jaywschwartz Sure, that sounds entirely relevant to my interests. Alas I fear perhaps I was less motivated by scientific progress than I was by wanting some sort of validation of my cat communication skills, which I would very much like to discover are highly advanced.

Hey Twitter! My lab is studying how humans perceive cat vocalizations and emotion. Are you willing to take about 20 minutes to help us out? All you need is a computer and headphones! Click this link to take our survey - FOR SCIENCE! tinyurl.com/256mvz7a Please RT :)

@JJRP3 Honestly, the reason I didn't focus on those kinds of categories for this study is because previous studies have done exactly that! Lemme know if you'd like links to any of those papers.

@jaywschwartz I'm a bit dissappointed I didn't get to sort the calls into "hello" "give me food" "this petting is proceeding satisfactorily" and "dissist or die".

@nailafukimoto @Yaxin__Liu If you're seeing a blue dot, then it's working as intended! You can click anywhere, not just along an axis. If you want to indicate high arousal and positive valence, click somewhere in the upper right corner. Hope this helps!

@jaywschwartz @Yaxin__Liu Same here. It lets you select only one axis and not both. I will try again later.

@susan_rudin Unfortunately we do ask that you use headphones - it's important to hear all the nuances of the sounds, and speakers often don't capture those. Though I hate that this excluded you! Thank you for sharing!

@jaywschwartz Is it imperative to have headphones? I don’t have any, but I would like to participate in your study. I will retweet to hopefully catch the attention of other cat lovers. 😺

I'm just now realizing I missed the opportunity to call this Meow Are You Feline

@Baba_Lilith @Explanimals That's an excellent question, and your guess is as good as mine! But I am really curious what qualifies as "sad-sounding" - and that's what I'm hoping to get at with this survey :)

@jaywschwartz @Explanimals Why does my cat go into another room and the meow REALLY loud and sad-sounding???

@CycleFunMtl Thanks for the feedback!

@Yaxin__Liu Thank you for the feedback! I'm looking into browser support.

@jaywschwartz I believe the recording for the emotional valence/arousal axis is not working as expected on this Qualtrics form (I'm using Safari on Mac).

WOW I cannot believe how great this community is. Thank you so much to all who have participated in and promoted our current study! If you're interested in animal emotional communication, you might like our new article, out today in @thePeerJ! Deets here: twitter.com/jaywschwartz/s…

Hey Twitter! My lab is studying how humans perceive animal emotional communication. Are you willing to take about 15-20 minutes to help us out? All you need is a computer and headphones! Click this link to take our survey - FOR SCIENCE! tinyurl.com/5n8ad4b3 Please RT :)

Humans read emotional arousal in monkey vocalizations: evidence for evolutionary continuities in communication. Research from Schwartz and Gouzoules @EmoryUniversity @WesternOregonU Read the full article bit.ly/3iuibj7 #AnimalBehavior #Anthropology #Zoology

Humans read emotional arousal in monkey vocalizations: evidence for evolutionary continuities in communication. Research from Schwartz and Gouzoules @EmoryUniversity @WesternOregonU Read the full article bit.ly/3iuibj7 #AnimalBehavior #Anthropology #Zoology

In our monkey listening task, using vocal pitch seemed lead to accurate judgments more often than not. We suggest this is because of similarities in how humans and monkeys communicate emotions, highlighting our shared evolutionary ancestry. For more: animalbehaviorandcognition.org/article.php?id…

In our newly published study, we tested whether humans can tell a high-arousal call from a low-arousal call. We found that they can, and seem to use the pitch and length of calls as cues. Incidentally, humans use the same cues when judging the emotional arousal of human screams!

People can often tell how someone is feeling just by their tone of voice. But can you do the same with monkey calls? We explored these questions in our new #OpenAccess study, just out today in @PeerJLife! Highlights in 🧵👇 peerj.com/articles/14471/