Children across cultures respond emotionally to the acoustic environment

Among human and non-human animals, the ability to respond rapidly to biologically significant events in the environment is essential for survival and development. Research has confirmed that human adult listeners respond emotionally to environmental sounds just as they understand the emotional connotations of speech prosody and music. However, it is unknown whether young children also respond emotionally to environmental sounds. Here, we report that changes in pitch, rate (i.e., playback speed), and intensity (i.e., amplitude) of environmental sounds trigger emotional responses in 4- and 5-year-old children, including sounds of human actions, animal calls, machinery, or natural phenomena such as wind and waves. This phenomenon was observed for children from the United States and China – countries with drastically different cultural traditions. We discuss theoretical frameworks that predict convergent emotional responses to music, speech, and environmental sounds, focusing on Charles Darwin’s hypothesis that speech and music originated from a common emotional signal system based on the imitation and modification of environmental sounds.

在人类与非人类动物中，对环境中具有生物学意义的事件的快速反应能力对于生存与发展至关重要。研究证实，人类成年听众对环境声音的情感反应与其理解语言韵律和音乐的情感内涵相同。然而，尚不清楚年幼儿童是否也会对环境声音产生情感反应。本研究报告指出，环境声音的音高、速率（即播放速度）和强度（即振幅）的变化，能够引发4岁和5岁儿童的情感反应，包括人类行为、动物鸣叫、机械声或风浪等自然现象的声音。这一现象在美国和中国儿童中均有观察，这两个国家拥有截然不同的文化传统。我们探讨了预测音乐、语言和环境声音产生趋同情感反应的理论框架，重点关注查尔斯·达尔文的假设，即语言和音乐起源于基于对环境声音的模仿与改造的共同情感信号系统。