Abstract
Human screams have been suggested to comprise a salient and readily identified call type, yet few studies have explored the degree to which people agree on what constitutes a scream, and the defining acoustic structure of screams has not been fully determined. In this study, participants listened to 75 human vocal sounds, representing both a broad acoustical range and array of emotional contexts, and classified each as to whether it was a scream or not. Participants showed substantial agreement on which sounds were considered screams, consistent with the idea of screams as a basic call type. Agreement on classifications was related to participant gender, emotion processing accuracy, and empathy. To characterize the acoustic structure of screams, we measured the stimuli on 27 acoustic parameters. Principal components analysis and generalized linear mixed modeling indicated that classification as a scream was positively correlated with 3 acoustic dimensions: one corresponding to high pitch and roughness, another corresponding to wide fundamental frequency variability and narrow interquartile range bandwidth, and a third positively correlated with peak frequency slope. Twenty-six stimuli were agreed upon by > 90% of participants to be screams, but these were not acoustically homogeneous, and others evoked mixed responses. These results suggest that while screams might represent a salient and possibly innate call type, they also exhibit perceptual and acoustic gradation, perhaps reflecting the wide range of emotions and contexts in which they occur.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Caitlin Clark, Alexander Gouzoules, Leah Friedman, Elizabeth Harlan, and NooRee Lee for assistance with stimulus collection, and Anna Duncan for assistance with stimulus and data collection. We also thank Anna M. Hardin and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.
Funding
JWS was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE – 1343012. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Schwartz, J.W., Engelberg, J.W.M. & Gouzoules, H. Was That a Scream? Listener Agreement and Major Distinguishing Acoustic Features. J Nonverbal Behav 44, 233–252 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-019-00325-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-019-00325-y