It’s a twist on the long-held belief that our brains are designed to sense threats first and foremost.
According to a new report, screams of joy are easier for our brains to grasp than screams of terror. The findings add a new layer of complexity to scientists’ long-held belief that our brains are programmed to detect and react to frightened screams as a survival mechanism.
The research looked at various forms of screams and how they are perceived by listeners.
The team, for example, asked participants to imagine being assaulted by an armed stranger in a dark alley and screaming in terror, as well as imagining their favorite team winning the World Cup and screaming in excitement. Each of the 12 participants screamed in seven different ways: six emotional screams (pain, rage, fear, enjoyment, sadness, and joy) and one neutral scream (the volunteer simply yelled the ‘a’ vowel loudly).
After that, separate groups of study participants were given the task of classifying and distinguishing between the various scream forms. 33 volunteers were given three seconds to listen to screams and categorize them into one of seven different screams in one mission.
In another mission, 35 volunteers were given two screams, one at a time, and asked to categorize them as quickly as possible while also attempting to make an informed decision about which form of scream it was, either alarming screams of pain, rage, or fear or non-alarming screams of happiness, sorrow, or joy. Fear and other disturbing screams took longer for participants to complete the mission, and those screams were not as quickly recognized as non-alarming screams like joy, according to the researchers. In a separate study, 30 volunteers were subjected to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while listening to the screams.
The team discovered that less-alerting screams elicited more activity in the auditory and frontal brain regions than more-alerting screams, but it’s unclear why.
According to Sascha Frühholz, a psychologist at the University of Zurich, “the study shows that scream communication and the forms in which we perceive that vocalization are diverse in humans, compared to other mammals whose screams are typically correlated with frightening situations like danger.” According to him, his research contradicts the widely held belief in neuroscience that the human brain is predominantly tuned to detect negative danger.
Though the results are limited only to the experiments and don’t reflect how humans would respond to screams in the real world, the rigor of the study methods provides a high confidence in the results, says Adeen Flinker, neuroscientist at New York University’s School of Medicine not involved in the study.
The team discovered that less-alerting screams elicited more activity in the auditory and frontal brain regions than more-alerting screams, but it’s unclear why.
According to Sascha Frühholz, a psychologist at the University of Zurich, “the study shows that scream communication and the forms in which we perceive that vocalization are diverse in humans, compared to other mammals whose screams are typically correlated with frightening situations like danger.” According to him, his research contradicts the widely held belief in neuroscience that the human brain is predominantly tuned to detect negative danger.
According to NYU psychologist David Poeppel, who was not involved in the research, the difference between alarming and non-alarming screams offers a “deeper understanding of this essential vocalization.” “A nice next stepping stone to create a more methodical and mechanistic understanding of how we handle screams,” he says, citing a variety of studies ranging from acoustic analysis to fMRI.
