Do human screams permit individual recognition?

Abstract

The recognition of individuals through vocalizations is a highly adaptive ability in the social behavior of many species, including humans. However, the extent to which nonlinguistic vocalizations such as screams permit individual recognition in humans remains unclear. Using a same-different vocalizer discrimination task, we investigated participants’ ability to correctly identify whether pairs of screams were produced by the same person or two different people, a critical prerequisite to individual recognition. Despite prior theory-based contentions that screams are not acoustically well-suited to conveying identity cues, listeners discriminated individuals at above-chance levels by their screams, including both acoustically modified and unmodified exemplars. We found that vocalizer gender explained some variation in participants’ discrimination abilities and response times, but participant attributes (gender, experience, empathy) did not. Our findings are consistent with abundant evidence from nonhuman primates, suggesting that both human and nonhuman screams convey cues to caller identity, thus supporting the thesis of evolutionary continuity in at least some aspects of scream function across primate species.

The ‘Threat of Scream’ paradigm: a tool for studying sustained physiological and subjective anxiety

“…Human distress screams are highly salient vocal signals of impending danger. Characterized by distinctive roughness acoustical properties which contribute to their aversiveness 24,40 , they are perceived as communicating fear 25 and convey cues as to caller identity 41 . Past experiments successfully substituted shocks with human screams to generate acute stress during fear conditioning paradigms (e.g.…”

Individual differences in human voice pitch are preserved from speech to screams, roars and pain cries

“…While it is possible that idiosyncratic differences in F0 between different vocalizers might be overridden by the more extreme F0 modulations that characterize agonistic and distress vocalizations, existing data on the F0 profiles of human grunts [15], roars [16], laughs and cries [19] indicate that such vocalizations retain a degree of sexual dimorphism, wherein men produce relatively lower-pitched vocalizations than do women. There is also preliminary evidence that within each sex, F0 in modal speech correlates with F0 in sung speech [20], and that cues to individual identity are retained in valenced human speech [21], laughter [22], cries [23], and in the screams of both humans ( [24], cf. [25]) and non-human primates [26] (with the caveat that speaker recognition is substantially reduced from these vocalizations compared to modal speech among human listeners [21,22,25]).…”

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

“…Stimuli were processed as previously described in Engelberg, Schwartz & Gouzoules (2019) . Specifically, online videos were captured or downloaded using Total Recorder version 8.0 (High Criteria, Inc., Richmond Hill, ON, Canada) and WinXHD Video Converter Deluxe (Digiarty Software, Inc., Chengdu, China), while DVD media were extracted using WinXDVD Ripper Platinum (Digiarty Software, Inc., Chengdu, China).…”

“…Historically, the majority of research on vocal emotional communication in humans has eschewed call types altogether, focusing instead on the capacity for prosodic cues accompanying speech to convey emotion ( Juslin & Laukka, 2003 ; Scherer et al, 1991 ) and other types of information ( Filippi, 2016 ; Tzeng et al, 2018 ). More recently, researchers have increasingly and promisingly investigated nonlinguistic vocalizations such as laughs, cries, and screams ( Engelberg, Schwartz & Gouzoules, 2019 ; Hawk et al, 2009 ; Sauter et al, 2010 ; Schröder, 2003 ; Schwartz, Engelberg & Gouzoules, 2019 )—that is, the vocalizations most likely comprising the repertoire of human call types ( Anikin, Bååth & Persson, 2018 ) that are homologous to calls in other species ( Davila-Ross, Owren & Zimmermann, 2009 ; Lingle et al, 2012 ; Owren, Amoss & Rendall, 2011 ). Much of this work has assessed the capacity for these vocalizations to convey emotion, revealing that different emotions map onto statistically-dissociable acoustic profiles ( Sauter et al, 2010 ), and that listeners can distinguish rather nuanced categories of emotion ( Hawk et al, 2009 ; Parsons et al, 2014 ; Sauter & Scott, 2007 ; Sauter et al, 2010 ; Schröder, 2003 ; Schwartz & Gouzoules, 2019 ; Simon-Thomas et al, 2009 ; Young et al, 2017 ).…”