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They say "Here's why", but they never explain why. They just found a correlation in what people think. No reason as to why we think that way... This could even

• HeXetic 7y ago
  That is an extremely common complaint about this kind of study/argument/proposal, and honestly no less valid because of it.
• beausievers 7y ago
  In the paper we do take a shot at explaining why. Specifically, we draw from the literature on cognitive ethology to argue that the ability to quickly and reliably read out emotion content from low-level stimulus features provides better prediction of others' behavior, and therefore an evolutionary selection advantage. We don't rule out learning processes (e.g., social conditioning), but we do examine evidence for some level of innateness. For example, cross-modal Bouba–Kiki-like effects are present in pre-linguistic infants, and arousal signals can be easily understood across species. It may end up that what is innate is a predisposition to track and learn cross-modal correspondences that are widespread in the environment. Link to paper pre-print: https://psyarxiv.com/wucs4 https://psyarxiv.com/wucs4