Alone in a small, padded room, Sascha Frühholz took a deep breath and unleashed an ear-splitting scream. He was there, in part, because of The Beatles.

While the observation may seem obvious, scientific studies on human screams have focused almost exclusively on vocalizations of anguish—and this oversight nagged at Frühholz. He and his colleagues set out to characterize the screams we utter for a range of emotions, negative and positive. By studying screams recorded in the small, padded room, the team identified six acoustically distinct scream categories: pain, anger, fear, joy, passion, and sadness. The study was published in PLOS Biology.

Unexpectedly, the researchers also found that volunteers more readily recognized—and their brains more efficiently processed—screams that were