Emotion in the sounds of pets' names.
Several thousand cats' and dogs' names were compared with each other and with several thousand men's and women's names in terms of their use of various sounds and the emotional associations of these sounds. Emotional associations were scored according to the system developed by Whissell in 2000. In general, cats' names stood in comparison to dogs' names as women's names stood in comparison to men's names. Names from the first group in each pairing included more pleasant and soft phonemes and fewer unpleasant and sad ones than those in the second group (one-way analyses of variance with post hoc LSD tests, p < .0001). As well, pets' names were longer and more easily pronounced by children than the human names (p < .0001).
Whissell
Cynthia
C
Psychology Department, Laurentian University, Sudbury, ON, Canada P3E 2C6.