https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7553-6876
Peer Review History
| Original SubmissionNovember 10, 2020 |
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Pécs, Hungary December 8, 2020 PONE-D-20-35135 When Animals Cry: The Effect of Adding Tears to Animal Expressions on Human Judgment PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Gadea, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised by the Reviewers, listed below. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 23 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Joseph Najbauer, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and 2. Thank you for including your ethics statement: "The study was under the standards of the Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of Valencia (Spain) and a written informed consent was obtained from all the participants.". Please amend your current ethics statement to confirm that your named institutional review board or ethics committee specifically approved this study. Once you have amended this/these statement(s) in the Methods section of the manuscript, please add the same text to the “Ethics Statement” field of the submission form (via “Edit Submission”). For additional information about PLOS ONE ethical requirements for human subjects research, please refer to http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-human-subjects-research. 3. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide. 4. Please include a copy of Table 1 which you refer to in your text on page 12. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Partly Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: I have read this contribution on adding tears to animal faces with great interest! Furthermore, I am convinced that it has merit in demonstrating how tears on animal faces are subject to anthropomorphism mechanisms, and that animal tears may influence perceived aggressiveness and friendliness of animals (even if these relationships are not strong). The paper is generally well written, although I spotted several smaller language issues along the way - i.e., the manuscript could still benefit from some thorough proof-reading. However, while I think there is reason to be excited about this work, I also saw some issues that limit the extent to which the findings can be interpreted. Perhaps most importantly, there was only a single exemplar for each species, and there was no pre-test data reported for the stimulus selection. E.g., it was unclear if all the baseline animal faces were indeed neutral in expression. Likewise, we do not know how typical these examples were. Would the same results be obtained for slightly different expressions, or different fur colors (affecting tear-visibility) among the same species? Conceptually, I felt that the role of "emotional tears" in this context was not so clear. Were these emotional tears at all? The answer seems to be that this was in the eye of the beholder - however, this would need to be introduced and discussed more clearly. Likewise, the reasoning about the difference between adding tears to neutral animal faces vs. neutral human faces (as in prior work) did not become clear to me. I believe there is a point here, but it would need to be better explained. Methodologically, I was struggling with the decision to obtain forced choice judgments for the discrete emotions. I find it particularly difficult to interpret any kinds of differences between the baseline images (i.e., the images without the tears that were not digitally manipulated) given this question format. In addition, I believe this should be regarded as a mixed design (with repeated measures across a series of exemplars), even if the exemplars themselves were between-subjects. A related concern here is that the Google-based image selection may have turned up examples that already differed with respect to expressions before the modification. I would therefore find it important to include a breakdown of the results per animal species and emotions (instead of or in addition to figure 3). Finally, relative tear-visibility, and tear-realism may have been a concern here, as the animals differed in both fur color, and the number of tears (one or two). This might be addressed by collecting some post test data for typicality (of the animal pictures), tear-visibility, and tear-realism. Despite these limitations, I overall found this paper to be very interesting and thought-provoking. It does lend support to the notion that humans might react to animal tears as if they were emotional, and that this might include the type of appeasement functions hypothesized by Hasson and others. I hope that the authors may find my more detailed comments below to be of aid in improving their manuscript. Introduction: One of the key arguments for conducting this study is the argument that, since animals do not cry in response to emotional feelings, adding visible tears to neutral emotional expressions presents an excellent opportunity to study the effect of tears. I would tend to agree with this general reasoning. However, the claim that because of this, emotional reactions in observers "can easily be attributed solely to the presence of tears" (p.4) may need some refinement and qualification. It would appear to be a bit more complicated than that. How does the fact that humans are the only species that sheds emotional tears influence the responses of participants? Does this require any conscious reflection by participants? E.g., Media Equation theory would seem to suggest that observers should respond to crying animal stimuli in a similar manner *as if* the tears were produced by humans. Issues to be considered here are (1) Participants may be more likely to be aware that the tears were digitally added, even provided that the tears look very realistic. It may still be that participants did not question or otherwise consciously reflect upon the presence of the tears in these faces - but if they did, then their emotional responses may also have been affected by this realization. (2) What precisely is the key difference here between seeing tears added to a neutral human face, and seeing tears added to the face of an animal? Animal faces can still be perceived as sad, aggressive etc. (even without the addition of tears). To what extent, and in which way precisely, does the manipulation of the animal faces go beyond adding tears to neutral human faces? I believe the authors have an interesting point here - but I think this needs to be further elaborated and clarified. That said, I agree that it is very interesting to study tears on animals for which we have very different stereotypes (you said "constructs" here - what precisely is meant with that in this context?). Also, the point about daily experience and closer interactions with animals helps to differentiate this from work in HRI/HCI. When raising the argument about anthropomorphism, I would suggest referring to some of the extant literature on zoomorphism as well. This is not an entirely new field, and it would appear to be highly relevant here. As some of the current references additionally relate to human-robot interaction, this could also include zoomorphic robots, such as Spot (Boston Dynamics), or Miro (Consequential Robotics). Perhaps it would also help to discuss that the kinds of animals selected in this study are all capable of shedding tears - they just do not use this as an emotional signal to conspecifics. This signalling function appears to be what is included in the process of anthropomorphization. Visual Stimuli The example of the dog in figure 1, in my view, looks convincing. However, I have been wondering about some of the other animals. E.g., for the cat, the white fur may have presented a challenge for obtaining comparable visibility/salience of the tears. For the hamster, I wonder if the size of the tears relative to the eyes and the rest of the animal's face might have posed a challenge. I trust that all these materials looked well in the end. However, it would be great if they could be made available in full via supplementary materials. Measures Why was the basic emotion item presented as a forced choice? This would appear to exclude the possibility of mixed emotions. Also, I think this makes it difficult to argue that there was "greater sadness" (see abstract). Instead, would this measure not only yield a frequency with which sadness appeared to be dominant? Procedure It seems that this was a mixed design, rather than a (pure) between-subjects design - with repeated measurements from each observer for intensity, friendliness, and aggressiveness. A GLMM may be a more suitable statistical approach for these analysis, as it could be used to control for effects of observer identity. Results Emotionality - Odds ratios Figure 3: This figure seems to be missing a scale on the y-axis. The figure caption helps somewhat - but I was still wondering why the squares have different widths. Is there an explanation for why the results for the cat went in the other direction? Given that there are different stereotypes about these different animals, as well as substantial differences in the basic morphology of their faces, it seems likely that even the tearless images may have been perceived as showing a certain amount of non-neutral expressions. Was there any evidence for this? Did expressions for the tearless animals vary between animals? If yes, then it might be useful to include a figure that shows the baseline emotions for each tearless animal before pooling all of this data. Intensity What does it mean that the dog and the chimpanzee "benefited" from the presence of the tears? Do you mean that they were anthropomophized more (more intense perceived emotions)? For friendliness, this is more straight forward. The gender effects for the horse condition are interesting and seem to align with the notion that personal relevance of the animal should matter. Figure 4: This figure is much too small and unreadable in the manuscript. The downloadable version was readable, however. Correlations between variables: I unfortunately could not find table 1 anywhere in the manuscript, nor in manuscript central. However, the most relevant results appear to have been reported in the text. SEM: I found the effects of tears on aggressiveness examined in this analysis to be very interesting. However, it seems that the direct effect, albeit significant, was rather weak. Likewise, the link to perceived friendliness also did not appear to be very strong. Nevertheless, it would seem worth reporting. Perhaps this might be further substantiated in future work, as it could help to make the point that human observers might transfer even some of the purported appeasement functions of this signal to other species. Unfortunately, I could not access the supplementary materials on OSF without logging in with my ID to request permission from the authors. Discussion: The discussion takes up the point again that emotional tears are a solely human feature that non-human animals are unable to produce. I found the argument about extending the work on appeasement signals to be very interesting, and perhaps more clearly formulated here than in the introduction. However, I found the distinction between emotional and non-emotional tears to be rather fuzzy here. I.e., on the one hand, the argument is made that non-human animals cannot produce emotional tears. On the other hand, shortly thereafter (p.13), it is argued that domestic animals gained benefits from "the emotional stimulus". Please be clearer on how these arguments go together to avoid confusion about when you are talking about emotional tears, and when you are talking about non-emotional tears. Note that the argumentation in the introduction and stimulus design was that tears were added to neutral faces of animals. Where does the emotional stimulus come from then? If the stimuli looked realistic (which I assume they all did), should these tears then not have been non-emotional tears? I think that this potential source of confusion could be addressed - i.e., it may not be necessary for the animals to shed emotional tears for human participants to perceive them as such. Nevertheless, I think would still need to be made more explicitly. I would see the finding that participants perceived these ostensibly non-emotional tears as noteworthy. The discussion mentions that some of the tears consisted of one teardrop, and some consisted of two teardrops. Given that there was only one exemplar per species, could this distinction have confounded some of the findings - e.g., concerning apparent differences between species? You might refer to prior work in this context that has looked at tear-intensity to address this issue at least partially (i.e., the amount of tears may not matter much). Still, this appears to be a relevant limitation that would call for further research. On dogs and cats: While I found the discussion about differences in how we relate to cats versus dogs interesting, I felt concerned here that this might be over-interpreting things, given that there was only a single exemplar - a single image, for each. Again, I think it would be important to include in the results also the emotions that were perceived for the unmodified stimuli. Might this specific dog face have been perceived as sadder to begin with, and the cat face as emotional in some other way? Were they both regarded as completely neutral without the tears? I would suggest expanding a bit more on the basic literature about facial expressions in cats and dogs before raising the point about familiarity. E.g., this might start from the DogFACS and CatFacs (both https://www.animalfacs.com/). SEM: On p.14, it is claimed that the absence of tears is associated with the perception of anger. Perhaps clarify that this discussion point is no longer about the SEM but about the forced-choice emotion rating task. Again, I was also not entirely convinced of this task. Participants saw (purportedly) neutral animal faces with or without tears. I would therefore expect any sense of "anger" in these faces to be rather subtle, and I iwonder if this apparent anger might have been due to slight biases in the selection of images. Were these images pre-tested? -> If the source animal faces were intended to be neutral, then this result would appear to suggest that they were not (entirely) neutral after all. Furthermore, the manipulation involved the addition of tears. Therefore, how does the absence of this manipulation indicate something about the effect of tears in this case? Here, I would be more convinced if there was a set of pre-tested neutral images and, e.g., a Likert-type or continuous scale for each of the discrete emotion. Then, if the addition of tears leads to a reduction of perceived "anger", this would seem to lend further support to Hasson's hypothesis. Strengths and limitations: I understood that this is the first study that systematically manipulated tears on animal images, and I would see this as one of the main contributions of this work. However, as in the introduction, I think it would help to elaborate a bit more about how tears on neutral animal faces might differ from examining tears on human faces. As concerns the limitations, I would see the limited number of exemplars as one of the crucial points. I agree that an excessive number of stimuli might result in habituation effects. However, perhaps there could be two or three exemplars per animal, possibly with somewhat fewer different animals? It could also help to present some additional pre-test or post-test data showing that the chosen exemplars in this study were perceived as both typical and "neutral" exemplars of their species. This is perhaps even emphasized by the findings discussed about animal species and their colors. Here, it would seem that cats, and dogs, and likely also hamsters and horses could be found that have an entirely different fur color. Would, e.g., a black (or dark brown) cat have elicited a different pattern of responses? Overall, I think that this paper makes a relevant contribution to the literature by showing that humans respond systematically to tears added to animal faces. The majority of the findings appears to show a rather consistent pattern to this effect, and this is strengthened even further by the fact that these animal faces were so heterogeneous overall. However, I would be more cautious when interpreting apparent differences between the species, or the apparent gender effects. The explanations raised for these effects appear plausible, but the present state of the findings seems rather tentative in this regard (mostly because of the very limited number of exemplars). Future Directions and conclusions I fully agree with the authors here, that this line of work opens up a lot of interesting possibilities for further research. Likewise, the conclusions very nicely summarize the main points and merits of this work. Reviewer #2: In this manuscript, the authors attempt to extend the theoretical and empirical literature on emotional tearing in humans to non-human animals (cat, dog, horse, chimpanzee, and hamster). Participant’s gave self-reported ratings of regarding perceptions of emotional intensity as well as individual variables that might affect these perceptions. Similar to the work on tearing in humans, it was found that the presence of tears affected perceptions of in non-humans. Here are my comments/concerns: 1. Lines 109-111 “… however, by blurring vision, tears are a handicap in the case of having to attack or defend against an attacker, as they blur vision.” I think it’s only necessary to mention the blurring of vision once here. 2. The authors mention that emotional tears are uniquely human. I’d like more of a discussion on why there would be expected to be a “tear effect” in non-humans in light of this fact. Of course, the data suggest that there is a reason, but I’d like to see more of a discussion on this. 3. The authors begin the Participants section with a number. I believe this should be written out if they are writing in APA style. 4. Do we have any reason to believe that the digitally added tears were seen as authentic? If not, this could be seen as a limitation. 5. The “F” should be italicized when presenting the F statistic. 6. On line 283, the authors state that “the dog and chimpanzee benefited from the presence of tears…” I think the term “benefited” should be replaced with a less judgmental term. A term that doesn’t imply anything positive or negative. This happens again on line 307. 7. The “r” should be italicized when presenting correlations. ********** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. |
| Revision 1 |
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Pécs, Hungary March 15, 2021 PONE-D-20-35135R1 When Animals Cry: The Effect of Adding Tears to Animal Expressions on Human Judgment PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Gadea, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised by the Reviewer, listed below. Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 30 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Joseph Najbauer, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: (No Response) ********** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ********** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes ********** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ********** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: Overall, I would like to thank the authors for having addressed my previous points so thoroughly! Taking this into account, I find the present version of this manuscript to be substantially improved. In particular, I appreciated the inclusion of the additional post-test and analyses included in the supplementary materials that, I think, are very helpful with respect to better understanding the strengths and limitations of the present work. Likewise, I would like to thank the authors for having performed additional fixed and random effects analyses. The finding that these results converged with the previous ANOVA-results suggest that these were indeed robust. It also makes sense to me to stick with presenting the simpler ANOVA results in this case. As illustrated by the post-test, a few limitations still remain: the limited number of exemplars; the lack of realism for a few of the stimuli (horse, cat); the variability in the extent to which some of the tearless stimuli were perceived as emotional (e.g., horse vs. dog). I therefore still find some parts of the discussion regarding differences between animal species (e.g., between cats and dogs) to perhaps be a bit premature at this point. Nevertheless, it is of course interesting to speculate about such differences, and this is being done more cautiously now (and in view of the limitations of this initial study). The discussion has furthermore been substantially improved overall, and the main findings are presented more clearly now. Results of the new rating study: I believe that the new post-test has helped to sufficiently strengthen this already very interesting paper. Since these materials are openly available, it should be easy to replicate/extend the current work. Tears were overall judged as very well visible in the new rating study. This, together with being able to view all the pictures in full helps to address a lot of the concerns about the technical soundness of this work. However, as shown by the study of the stimuli, some limitations do remain. First, perceived emotionality of the tearless images appears to have been quite variable. In particular, the tearless horse picture seems to have been perceived as substantially less emotional than the dog picture (which was already perceived as very emotional even without tears). This suggests that some of the effects of tears on specific animal images may indeed be more difficult, and perhaps more interesting, to interpret (see discussion). Second, it seems that the tears on the Horse and Cat may not have been perceived as sufficiently realistic. I.e., here, it would seem that the answer to this question from the response letter: "provided they were perceived as realistic from the new study" - may have to be that this is not fully supported by the post-test. Nevertheless, neither of these limitations would seem to invalidate/threaten the conclusion that the addition of tears generally increased perceived emotionality. I only have a few minor additional comments beyond the above-mentioned limitations of the post-test: Introduction: I was not sure if quite as much background on human eye gaze is needed here. The first paragraph might be shortened somewhat to move more quickly towards tears, or animal crying. Regarding reference [9], i.e., responses to tears within 50 milliseconds - here, recent work has so far failed to replicate this finding (Gračanin et al., 2021). Reference: Gračanin, A., Krahmer, E., Balsters, M., Küster, D., & Vingerhoets, A. J. (2021). How weeping influences the perception of facial expressions: The signal value of tears. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 45(1), 83-105. Minor points: p.5, l.134: there is an opening "(" here that is missing the closing ")". p.5, l.154: replace "according their lacking of..." with "according to their lack of..." p.6, l.174: replace "for such process" with "for such [a] process" p.16, l.450: replace "confirmed our hypothesis" with "supported our hypothesis" ********** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. |
| Revision 2 |
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Pécs, Hungary April 19, 2021 When Animals Cry: The Effect of Adding Tears to Animal Expressions on Human Judgment PONE-D-20-35135R2 Dear Dr. Gadea, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript (R2 version) has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Joseph Najbauer, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE ------------------------------------------------- Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed ********** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ********** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes ********** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ********** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: (No Response) ********** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: Yes: Dennis Küster |
| Formally Accepted |
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PONE-D-20-35135R2 When animals cry: The effect of adding tears to animal expressions on human judgment Dear Dr. Gadea: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Joseph Najbauer Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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