Human Ratings of Emotional Valence in Frequency-Shifted Rat Ultrasonic Vocalizations

Human subjects correctly assigned emotional valence to artificially transposed rat ultrasonic vocalizations, with performance depending on the degree of frequency shift. This 19.8 KB dataset by Eduard Maier, last updated in May 2026, suggests emotional communication is conserved across species. The data likely contains human ratings of rat vocalizations under different frequency-shift conditions.

Use Cases

• Train models to classify emotional valence based on acoustic features of animal vocalizations.
• Study cross-species perception of emotion using human ratings of non-human vocal signals.
• Analyze the effect of frequency manipulation on the perceived emotional content of sounds.
• Investigate the universality of emotional recognition across different auditory ranges.

Strengths

• Dataset is openly licensed under CC-BY-4.0.
• The core finding—human ability to assign valence to shifted rat calls—is a distinctive, documented result.
• Last update timestamp (2026-05-20) is provided.

Limitations

• The dataset is very small at 19.8 KB, indicating limited scope.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Eduard Maier via figshare.

Collection Method

Likely gathered from human subject experiments rating rat vocalizations.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-20 05:49:51.