Comparison of emotional responses between young and elderly individuals under different sound source conditions

In the paper, four types of sound sources were selected, including animal sounds, human behavior sounds, natural sounds, and machine sounds. Each type of sound source contains eight types of sound sources. Six discrete emotions with anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise, and fear are evaluated by young and elderly people through listening and questionnaire surveys under these sound source conditions. The results showed that machine sounds are more likely to cause emotions of anger and disgust, Natural sounds are more likely to trigger feelings of joy, sadness, surprise, or fear. Most of the six basic emotions are correlated with each other. In terms of the difference in evaluation between young and elderly people, most emotional response trends and degrees to various sound sources between young and elderly people are similar basically, but there are some sound sources that are obviously more likely to trigger related emotional reactions in young people, and less likely to trigger emotional reactions in elderly people. It provides a certain experimental reference basis for the sound environment design of urban public spaces.