Behavioural responses of domestic cats to human vocalizations reflect generalized arousal rather than emotion-specific processing

Domestic cats are known to be sensitive to human socio-emotional signals; however, how they process the emotional content of human vocalizations remains unclear. In this study, we investigated whether cats discriminate four basic human emotions (happiness, anger, fear, and sadness) expressed through non-verbal vocalizations, and whether these stimuli elicit lateralized auditory responses. Twenty domestic cats were tested in their home environment using a playback paradigm with human vocalizations. Behavioural responses were assessed through a composite score based on three stress-related behavioural categories (relaxed, moderate stress, and severe stress), together with head-turning direction, latency, and time spent looking at the speakers. Results revealed a significant effect of stress-related behavioural categories, with higher scores in the moderate stress condition compared to both relaxed and severe stress conditions, regardless of the emotional vocalization presented. In addition, no population-level asymmetries in head-turning responses were observed across emotional vocalizations. These findings indicate that human non-verbal vocalizations are sufficient to induce a measurable behavioural modulation in cats, but do not provide evidence of emotion-specific discrimination or lateralized processing at the population level. Instead, cats’ responses appear to reflect a generalized increase in arousal in response to human vocal cues, suggesting that vocal signals alone may convey limited information for fine-grained emotional decoding in this species.