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PHOTOGRAPH BY GLASSHOUSE IMAGES, ALAMY
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By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE executive editor
I love a good mosh pit, but standing about five feet tall, I am not what many people would describe as tall or imposing. So when someone inevitably knocked me over at an Offspring concert, I found myself curled on the ground unable to push my way back to my feet, screaming at the top of my lungs. Of course, my screams mingled with the cries of excitement and joy from the mob all around me. I was lucky; a more muscular friend saw me go down and waded into the crowd to pick me up.
What neither of us could know at the time is that—counterintuitively—the human brain seems primed to respond faster to shrieks of joy than howls of fear.
As our Maya Wei-Haas reports this week, scientists at the University of Oslo have found that humans actually have six acoustically distinct scream categories: pain, anger, fear, joy, passion, and sadness. Based on brain scans, the scientists also determined that people more easily recognize joyful screams above the other categories. So, your brain lights up when you hear crowds swooning over pop stars much more effortlessly than when someone lets out a blood-curdling wail.
That presents something of an evolutionary puzzle since screams are most often associated with warning others of danger, or as cries for help. “It’s the most intense vocalization that we actually can produce,” study leader Sascha Frühholz tells us. It may be a while until science can unravel this conundrum. Studies of nonverbal vocalizations in humans are not that common, in part because speech and language have seemed so unique (and therefore more exciting) to our species. But in addition to work that increasingly shows complex communications among non-humans, a number of studies are now looking at the non-verbal sounds, like screams and laughs, that we share with other animals.
“To understand the evolution of human vocal communication and ultimately how we came to speak,” says University of Lyon scientist Katarzyna Pisanski, “we really need to understand all of these differences."
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