Positive emotional contagions are outwardly emotive actions that spread from one individual to another, such as glee in preschool children [1] or laughter in humans of all ages [2]. The play vocalizations of some animals may also act as emotional contagions. For example, artificially deafened rats are less likely to play than their non-hearing-impaired conspecifics, while no such effect is found for blinded rats [3]. As rat play vocalizations are also produced in anticipation of play, they, rather than the play itself, may act as a contagion, leading to a hypothesis of evolutionary parallels between rat play vocalizations and human laughter [4]. The kea parrot (Nestor notabilis) has complex play behaviour and a distinct play vocalization [5]. We used acoustic playback to investigate the effect of play calls on wild kea, finding that play vocalizations increase the amount of play among both juveniles and adults, likely by acting as a positive emotional contagion.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1023. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 07 August 2026.
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Altmetric has tracked 34,528,520 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 17,314 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 63.8. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 98% of its peers.
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