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Screams & Screaming

EnolaGaia

I knew the job was dangerous when I took it ...
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We have a lot of threads which involve screams, but no thread on the subject of screams and screaming per se.

This online article provides an overview of human screams, screaming behaviors, and the evolutionary history of screaming.
Why we love big, blood-curdling screams

Of all the sounds humans produce, nothing captures our attention quite like a good scream.

They’re a regular feature of horror films, whether it’s Marion Crane’s infamous shower scream in “Psycho” or Chrissie Watkins’ blood-curdling scream at the beginning of “Jaws.”

Screams might seem simple, but they can actually convey a complex set of emotions. The arsenal of human screams has been honed over millions of years of evolution, with subtle nuances in volume, timing and inflection that can signal different things. ...

Here's an excerpt summarizing some major points about human screaming ...

Like monkeys, humans have the ability to identify people they know by the sound of their screams.

Humans produce a range of screams as well: There are screams that reflect more positive emotions, such as surprise and happiness. And then there are screams of anguish, screams of pain and, of course, screams of terror.

Screams can be described according to their place along an acoustic dimension known as “roughness.”

Roughness is a quality that reflects the rate at which a scream changes or varies in loudness. The more rapidly the loudness fluctuates, the “rougher” the scream. And the rougher a scream is, the more terrifying it’s perceived to be. ...

Psychologist David Poeppel looked at brain images of people listening to recordings of human screams and found that, unlike other human vocalizations, screams get routed directly to the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that processes fear, anger and other intense emotions.

And among the variety of human screams, it is screams of terror that stand out most vividly. Other unpleasant sounds, such as a baby’s cry and fingernails on a chalkboard, share some of the same features that make screams unpleasant and terrifying. ...

FULL STORY: https://theconversation.com/why-we-love-big-blood-curdling-screams-124148
 
This 2015 TIME article provides more details on the research that discovered scream stimuli are "routed" to the amygdala (fear center).
Scientists Now Know Why People Scream

A baby wails upon an airplane’s liftoff, a person shrieks when he stumbles upon something shocking, a kid throws a tantrum because she wants to get her way—people scream in reaction to all kinds of situations.

But exactly why we scream has remained a mystery. Now, new research published in the journal Current Biology suggests that hearing a scream may activate the brain’s fear circuitry, acting as a cautionary signal.

Scream science is a new area of study, so David Poeppel, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, and his co-authors collected an array of screams from YouTube, films and 19 volunteer screamers who screamed in a lab sound booth. (This last collection method, by the way, was a highlight for Poeppel, who said he found listening to and judging screams an amusing break from the monotony of lab work.)

The researchers first measured the sound properties of screams versus normal conversation. They measured the scream’s volume and looked at how volunteers responded behaviorally to screams. They then looked at brain images of people listening to screams and saw something they found fascinating—screams weren’t being interpreted by the brain the way normal sounds were.

Normally, your brain takes a sound you hear and delivers it to a section of your brain dedicated to making sense of these sounds: What is the gender of the speaker? Their age? Their tone?

Screams, however, don’t seem to follow that route. Instead, the team discovered that screams are sent from the ear to the amygdala, the brain’s fear processing warehouse, says Poeppel.

“In brain imaging parts of the experiment, screams activate the fear circuitry of the brain,” he says. “The amygdala is a nucleus in the brain especially sensitive to information about fear.” That means screams are inherently considered not just sound but a trigger for heightened awareness. ...

FULL STORY: https://time.com/3956127/scream-screaming/

See Also:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/07/why-screams-are-so-scary
 
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This May 2019 New Scientist article reports on two key criteria for humans categorizing a vocalization as a scream - high pitch and the sort of amplitude variation or "roughness" cited in the articles linked above.
Aaaaaargh! The true nature of screaming has finally been revealed

What’s in a scream? The vocalisations people identify as screams share certain sound qualities – a kind of acoustic DNA that tells a listener’s ear that what they’re hearing is a scream, even if it isn’t.

“Evolutionarily, screams likely originally functioned to startle attacking predators. Research on screams has the potential to help us understand the evolution of emotional communication,” says Jay Schwartz at Emory University.

He and his colleagues asked 181 volunteers to listen to 75 vocal sounds that included laughter, crying, moans, groans, and yells from acted sources – like television or movies – and more natural sources ...

The listeners indicated whether or not each sound was something they considered a scream. “We did not provide any type of definition for a scream because we were trying to get at what is it in people’s minds that distinguishes a scream from other types of vocalisations,” says Schwartz ...

When they analysed the sound files, they found that the ones categorised as screams had acoustic similarities. People were more likely to consider a sound a scream if it was higher in pitch, and had a varied change in pitch, first moving up and then down at the end.

... Sounds that maintained a more steady pitch were less likely to be perceived as a scream. ...

Rapid changes in amplitude – perceived as a rough, gravelly quality – also tended to be classified as screams more than vocalisations with a smoother tone. ...

Surprisingly, a recording of a whistle was categorised as a scream by 70 per cent of the participants. “It was because the whistle exhibited a lot of the acoustic qualities that we found to be associated with a scream, including high pitch and roughness,” says Schwartz.

FULL STORY: https://www.newscientist.com/articl...ature-of-screaming-has-finally-been-revealed/
 
Screams can simply be therapeutic / cathartic ...
Let it all out by calling the 'Just Scream!' hotline

There's a new outlet for your frustration that's as easy as picking up your phone.

Just Scream! is a hotline created by elementary school teacher Chris Gollmar.

You can call the number and just scream for as long and as loudly as you want.

There's no one on the other end and numbers aren't saved.

"I wanted to find a prompt that people would respond to and screaming seemed to be a good fit!" Gollmar told CNN of his creative project, which he came up with in September 2020 and launched just before Election Day in November.

The calls are recorded and put up on a website, which currently has a backlog of more than 40,000 screams.

"Why should I call you?" the website asks."To scream! You might be unhappy, terrified, frustrated, or elated. All of these are perfectly good reasons to call and record yourself screaming."

Gollmar said he's gotten 70,000 recordings since launching the hotline.

The hotline will stop accepting calls on January 21. The screams will remain on the website.

SOURCE: https://abc7ny.com/society/let-it-all-out-by-calling-the-just-scream-hotline/9805836/

THE WEBSITE: https://justscream.baby
 
You will have heard the Wilhelm scream in fillums all your life:
(Safe Wiki page)

The Wilhelm scream

The Wilhelm scream is a stock sound effect that has been used in a number of films and TV series, beginning in 1951 with the film Distant Drums.

The scream is usually used when someone is shot, falls from a great height, or is thrown from an explosion. The sound is named after Private Wilhelm, a character in The Charge at Feather River, a 1953 Western in which the character gets shot in the thigh with an arrow.

This was its first use following its inclusion in the Warner Bros. stock sound library, although The Charge at Feather River is believed to have been the third film to use the effect.

The scream is believed to be voiced by actor Sheb Wooley.
 
Newly reported research identifies 6 basic types of human screams and seems to demonstrate our brains react faster to non-alarming screams rather than screams indicative of danger or trouble.
Human Screams Communicate at Least Six Emotions – Surprisingly Acoustically Diverse

Human screams signal more than fear and are more acoustically diverse than previously thought, according to a study published today (April 13th, 2021) in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Sascha Frühholz of the University of Zurich, and colleagues. Remarkably, non-alarming screams are perceived and processed by the brain more efficiently than alarming screams.

In nonhuman primates and other mammalian species, scream-like calls are frequently used as an alarm signal exclusively in negative contexts, such social conflicts or the presence of predators or other environmental threats. Humans are also assumed to use screams to signal danger and to scare predators. But humans scream not only when they are fearful and aggressive, but also when they experience other emotions such as despair and elation. Past studies on this topic largely focused on alarming fear screams, so the broader significance of various scream types has not been clear. In the new study, the researchers addressed this knowledge gap using four different psychoacoustic, perceptual decision-making, and neuroimaging experiments in humans.. ...

The results revealed six psycho-acoustically distinct types of scream calls, which indicated pain, anger, fear, pleasure, sadness, and joy. Perhaps surprisingly, listeners responded more quickly and accurately, and with higher neural sensitivity, to non-alarm and positive scream calls than to alarming screams. ...

FULL STORY: https://scitechdaily.com/human-scre...x-emotions-surprisingly-acoustically-diverse/

See Also:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/human-brain-recognize-scream-joy-faster-fear
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract from the published research report.

The full research report is accessible at the link below.
Neurocognitive processing efficiency for discriminating human non-alarm rather than alarm scream calls
Sascha Frühholz , Joris Dietziker, Matthias Staib, Wiebke Trost
PLOS Biology
Published: April 13, 2021https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000751

Abstract
Across many species, scream calls signal the affective significance of events to other agents. Scream calls were often thought to be of generic alarming and fearful nature, to signal potential threats, with instantaneous, involuntary, and accurate recognition by perceivers. However, scream calls are more diverse in their affective signaling nature than being limited to fearfully alarming a threat, and thus the broader sociobiological relevance of various scream types is unclear. Here we used 4 different psychoacoustic, perceptual decision-making, and neuroimaging experiments in humans to demonstrate the existence of at least 6 psychoacoustically distinctive types of scream calls of both alarming and non-alarming nature, rather than there being only screams caused by fear or aggression. Second, based on perceptual and processing sensitivity measures for decision-making during scream recognition, we found that alarm screams (with some exceptions) were overall discriminated the worst, were responded to the slowest, and were associated with a lower perceptual sensitivity for their recognition compared with non-alarm screams. Third, the neural processing of alarm compared with non-alarm screams during an implicit processing task elicited only minimal neural signal and connectivity in perceivers, contrary to the frequent assumption of a threat processing bias of the primate neural system. These findings show that scream calls are more diverse in their signaling and communicative nature in humans than previously assumed, and, in contrast to a commonly observed threat processing bias in perceptual discriminations and neural processes, we found that especially non-alarm screams, and positive screams in particular, seem to have higher efficiency in speeded discriminations and the implicit neural processing of various scream types in humans.

SOURCE (& FULL REPORT): https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000751
 
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