The psychology of screaming
This article is an adaptation of our weekly Science newsletter that was originally sent out on April 14, 2021. Want this in your inbox? Sign up here.
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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TODAY IN A MINUTE
Almost ready for liftoff: The historic flight of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter has been delayed while engineers give the robot a software upgrade. We should have word next week when the four-pound Ingenuity is expected to ascend 10 feet on a 30-second trip. Though humble, the inaugural flight could open new opportunities for exploration, MiMi Aung, Ingenuity’s project manager, told Nat Geo. (Above, an image of Ingenuity on Mars’ surface on April 8.)
The one-shot halt: The CDC is meeting today to review six cases of blood clotting in the U.S. from nearly 7 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. Despite the relatively small number of clotting cases, regulators on Tuesday recommended pausing use of the company’s one-dose vaccine during the review, Nat Geo reports in its roundup of vaccine developments. The virus has stricken more than 31 million Americans.
Homegrown virus fighters: Microbiologists are looking at new ways to fight viral infections, including COVID-19, with the bacteria already living in your intestine. “Imagine microbes that block a virus from entering a cell or communicate with the cell and make it a less desirable place for the virus to set up residence,” microbiologist Mark Kaplan tells Nat Geo. “Manipulating those lines of communication might give us an arsenal to help your body fight the virus more effectively.”
Open source: Stanford scientists used discarded COVID-19 vaccine headed to the trash to reverse engineer the code for the mRNA sequence that powers the Moderna vaccine. Why? “Knowing these sequences and having the ability to differentiate them from other RNAs in analyzing future biomedical data sets is of great utility,” scientists Andrew Fire and Massa Shoura told Vice News’s Motherboard blog in an email.
Zoom can be exhausting: Does a day of videoconferencing leave you fatigued? You’re not alone. Unfortunately, “Zoom fatigue” is a real thing that might be here to stay for years. New research examines the causes and concludes that women are more fatigued. The good news is that employers and tech companies can maintain the positive aspects of remote work and help alleviate the drain, Theresa Machemer writes for Nat Geo.
What a waste: The carbon emissions from Bitcoin mining in China, which accounts for 75 percent of Bitcoin blockchain operations globally, is projected at 130 million metric tons in 2024, Bloomberg Green reports. That’s more than the overall emissions from the Netherlands, Spain, or the Czech Republic. Bitcoin demands a massive computational power to validate transactions, which means the mining hardware creates considerable environmental harm. Also injurious to the planet: the massive energy consumption needed to produce the digital collectibles known as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs.
INSTAGRAM PHOTO OF THE DAY
Preserved: Inside this lab, rows of alcohol-filled jars containing, from left, the heads of an alligator, a crocodile, and a whole chameleon. The study of anatomical specimens is part of the process to interpret the internal anatomy of extinct dinosaurs in the lab of Lawrence Witmer, a paleontologist at Ohio University.
Subscriber exclusive: Prehistoric dinosaurs get a modern reboot
THE NIGHT SKIES
Moon and Mars get ‘close’: Look for the moon shining halfway up the western sky at dusk on Friday. The bright orange starlike beacon of Mars will appear just above it. The next evening, the two worlds will appear to glide past each other extremely close—less than one degree, or a separation less than the width of your little finger held at arm’s length. For lucky observers across parts of Southeast Asia, the red planet will seem to disappear behind the waxing crescent moon for a short time—a phenomenon known as a lunar occultation. — Andrew Fazekas
Get closer: What would it be like to live on Mars? Try this simulation.
See: Incredible photos of the Martian surface
THE BIG TAKEAWAY
Widening the bubbles: Above, children wearing face masks play with bubbles at a park last month in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. People have been taking advantage of loosened COVID-19 restrictions to gather outside and in groups for the first time in months. Does everyone need to wear a mask outside? It depends, experts tell Tara Haelle in an article for Nat Geo.
IN A FEW WORDS
Increasing fiber in our diet is an effective way to improve the gut microbiome and it may help better management and prevention of COVID-19 now and also of chronic diseases throughout life.
Heenam Stanley Kim, Microbiologist, Korea University in Seoul, From: Microbes in your gut may be new recruits in the fight against viruses
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THE LAST GLIMPSE
Gross, but necessary: Nearly half of all animals on Earth are parasites. Yeah, they’re slimy, flaccid, and wiggling. But some of these unsexy beings are endangered, and needed for ecosystems to thrive. How, exactly? Well, the larvae of the horsehead worm infiltrate and grow inside crickets (pictured above by Nat Geo Explorer Anand Varma). The worms need water to mate, so they drive the insects to jump into streams, where they become an important food source for fish. Once you get past the ick factor on parasites, they’re plucky and charming, parasite ecologist Chelsea Wood tells Nat Geo. “If you look at them under the microscope, they are just staggeringly beautiful.”
This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard and Monica Williams, with photo selections by Jen Tse. Have an idea, a link, a way to deal with Zoom fatigue? We'd love to hear from you at david.beard@natgeo.com. Thanks for reading, and have a good week ahead.
