Screams of "Joy" are Often Mistaken for "Fear" When Heard Out of Context

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Screams of "Joy" Are Often Mistaken for "Fear" When Heard Out of Context:

People are adept at discerning most of the different emotions that underlie screams, such as anger, frustration, pain, surprise, or fear, finds a new study by psychologists at Emory University. Screams of happiness, however, are more often interpreted as fear when heard without any additional context, the results show.

[...] "To a large extent, the study participants were quite good at judging the original context of a scream, simply by listening to it through headphones without any visual cues," says Harold Gouzoules, Emory professor of psychology and senior author of the study. "But when participants listened to screams of excited happiness they tended to judge the emotion as fear.

[...] While screams can convey strong emotions, they are not ideal as individual identifiers, since they lack the more distinctive and consistent acoustic parameters of an individual's speaking voice.

"It's just speculative, but it may be that when children scream with excitement as they play, it serves the evolutionary role of familiarizing a parent to the unique sound of their screams," Gouzoules says. "The more you hear your child scream in a safe, happy context, the better able you are to identify a scream as belonging to your child, so you will know to respond when you hear it."

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