The research supports naturalist Charles Darwin's views from over a century ago, when he observed that humans and other animals express their emotions in similar ways.
Previous research on the topic of animal vocalizations has suggested that animals understand human emotional sounds.
For example, pet owners are usually attuned to this and their pets recognize their emotional outbursts.
Previous studies have also suggested that acoustic attributes of emotional (aroused) vocalizations are shared across many mammal species, and that humans can use these attributes to determine an animal's emotional state.
But researchers weren't sure if this also extended to land animals that aren't mammals.
To find out, an international team of researchers gathered the voice recordings of a diverse group of nine different species: The black-capped chickadee, hourglass treefrog, American alligator, common raven, giant panda, barbary macaque and the African bush elephant.
Then, research participants were asked to listen to the recordings and try to identify the emotional state of the animal who made it.
To rule out the possibility that certain sounds may be more recognizable by people who speak certain language, the researchers recruited volunteers who spoke German, English or Mandarin.
The researchers also carried out an acoustic analysis of the sounds on the recordings, comparing the sounds with people's reactions to them and found that humans use many acoustic clues to understand emotional noises made by other animals.