Published in Animal Behavior and Cognition, this study by Karine Silva, T. Faragó, P. Pongrácz, Patrícia Romeiro, Mariely Lima, and L. Sousa tests whether people from different cultural backgrounds can accurately assess emotional content in dog barks. The original 2005 experiment demonstrated that Hungarian listeners could categorize barks from various social contexts above chance level and infer the emotional state of the dog generating them.
This replication explored whether Portuguese participants—both dog owners and non-owners—would show similar abilities. Using the same categories of recorded barks (e.g., territorial defense, separation distress), participants were asked to classify context and evaluate emotional states.
Results revealed strong cross-cultural consistency. Like Hungarian listeners, Portuguese participants rated barks in ways that aligned with the known social contexts from which they were recorded. For example, barks from a dog left alone were judged as more fearful or distressed rather than playful. Participants also categorized territorial and separation-related barks above chance level, demonstrating a broad ability to interpret canine vocal signals.
However, Portuguese listeners were less accurate overall than Hungarians in categorizing the barks. Despite this difference, the general pattern of errors was similar across both groups, supporting the idea that some aspects of vocal emotion recognition in mammals may reflect universal perceptual mechanisms.
Several individual-level effects emerged: • Women in both countries attributed higher levels of despair to the barks. • Within the Portuguese sample, dog owners were generally more accurate than non-owners, suggesting that experience with dogs enhances vocal-emotion recognition.
Overall, the study strengthens the evidence that humans can interpret emotional cues in dog barks, while also highlighting cultural, experiential, and sex-based differences. These findings contribute to understanding how humans perceive nonhuman vocalizations and underline the complex interplay between universal and culture-specific factors in cross-species communication.
Source: Silva, K., Faragó, T., Pongrácz, P., Romeiro, P., Lima, M., & Sousa, L. (2021). Humans’ Ability to Assess Emotion in Dog Barks Only Slightly Affected by their Country of Residence, a Replication of Pongracz et al. (2005) in a Portuguese Sample. Animal Behavior and Cognition. Published May 1, 2021.
