The emotional canvas of human screams: patterns and acoustic cues in the perceptual categorization of a basic call type.

ABSTRACT: Screams occur across taxonomically widespread species, typically in antipredator situations, and are strikingly similar acoustically, but in nonhuman primates, they have taken on acoustically varied forms in association with more contextually complex functions related to agonistic recruitment. Humans scream in an even broader range of contexts, but the extent to which acoustic variation allows listeners to perceive different emotional meanings remains unknown. We investigated how listeners responded to 30 contextually diverse human screams on six different emotion prompts as well as how selected acoustic cues predicted these responses. We found that acoustic variation in screams was associated with the perception of different emotions from these calls. Emotion ratings generally fell along

SUBMITTER: Engelberg JWM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7953872 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature