In the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, an interdisciplinary team explored possible regularities in vocal emotional expressions by comparing expressive interjections, such as “wow,” to nonlinguistic vocalizations, such as screams and cries, from across the globe. The researchers analyzed vowels in interjections from 131 languages, comparing them with nearly 500 vowels from vocalizations produced in joyful, painful, or disgusting contexts. Each of the three emotions yielded consistent and distinct vowel signatures across cultures in vocalizations.

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