Human screams convey a level of individual identity that may help explain their evolutionary origins, finds a study by scientists at Emory University.
PeerJ published the research, showing that listeners can correctly identify whether pairs of screams were produced by the same person or two different people — a critical prerequisite to individual recognition.
“Our findings add to our understanding of how screams are evolutionarily important,” says Harold Gouzoules, senior author of the paper and an Emory professor of psychology. “The ability to identify who is screaming is likely an adaptive mechanism. The idea is that you wouldn’t respond equally to just anyone’s scream. You would likely respond more urgently to a scream from your child, or from someone else important to you.”
Jonathan Engelberg is first author of the paper and Jay Schwartz is a co-author. They are both Emory PhD candidates in Gouzoules’ Bioacoustics Lab.
The ability to recognize individuals by distinctive cues or signals is essential to the organization of social behavior, the authors note, and humans are adept at making identity-related judgements based on speech — even when the speech is heavily altered. Less is known, however, about identity cues in nonlinguistic vocalizations, such as screams.