In this context, being able to know when a scream suggests a patient is in pain would help doctors treat a person who is unable to speak. Gouzoules sees particular promise when it comes to medical issues that involve “vocally disruptive behavior,” such as dementia. In fact, the only consistent giveaway that a scream was fake was that it lasted too long-but who could blame Hollywood for indulging in drama?įor now, the research conducted by screamologists like Gouzoules and Poeppel is still exploratory, but it may one day find real-world applications.
Both researchers relied on a mix of screams lifted from the internet and screams recorded in their labs, but this raises a further question about how humans interpret screams: Can we tell when someone is faking it? According to research published by Gouzoules in December, we’re not very good at telling when a scream is real or fake. To get a better understanding of positive screams will require more data, which Poeppel and Gouzoules say is tricky to collect. Humans do seem to be able to distinguish screams of fear from screams of aggression, but they have a harder time distinguishing screams of fear from screams of excitement. Gouzoules says his initial analysis of data collected in his lab, which has yet to be published, suggests the answer is a qualified yes. An important caveat with Poeppel’s research is that it was focused exclusively on screams of fear, which raised the question of whether roughness is a defining characteristic of all types of screams or just fearful ones. Volunteers consistently ranked rougher sounds as more alarming, and the brain images showed that the amount of blood that flowed to the amygdalae, two small brain regions that process fear and other emotions, was correlated with the roughness of a sound. Although screams sound like a pure tone, they’re actually rapidly changing in volume dozens of times per second. A defining characteristic of fearful screams was their roughness, a measure of how rapidly the loudness of a sound fluctuates. The conclusions of Poeppel’s study were unambiguous. Poeppel also imaged the brains of his volunteers as they listened to screams to see how these sounds affected neural activity. To do this, Poeppel and his colleagues compiled a corpus of screams lifted from YouTube videos and ones recorded in their lab, then asked volunteers to rank them according to how alarming the sound was. In 2015, David Poeppel, a neuroscientist at New York University and the Max Planck Institute, led a study to determine the acoustic qualities that differentiate fearful screams from other nonverbal vocalizations. Most people would say that the defining characteristic of a scream is that it is loud and high-pitched, but previous scream research suggests otherwise. The researchers then analyzed 28 acoustic signatures of the sounds, such as pitch, frequency, and timbre, to determine which parameters influence the perception of a sound as a scream. For each of the 75 sounds, the volunteers were asked whether they thought it was a scream. To that end, researchers at Emory University’s Bioacoustics Laboratory recruited 181 volunteers to listen to short recordings of 75 nonverbal human vocalizations, such as screams, laughter, and crying. But first scientists need to explain what makes a scream a scream.
Understanding its characteristics could improve the treatment of nonverbal patients, help fight crime, or simply make movies more frightening. Although we are fully symbolic creatures today, on occasion a trace of our primal selves bubbles to the surface in the form of a scream. It is a way to explore our prelinguistic past. To study screams is to probe the fuzzy boundary that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. Though we're pretty good at recognizing a scream when we hear one, the wide variety of screams makes it difficult to pin down what defines them. Screaming is exhibited by many animals, but no species uses this extreme vocalization in as many different contexts as humans. For ice cream, sure, but also for fear, excitement, sexual pleasure, pain, anger, and- if online commenters are to be believed-memes ?.