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There’s a rumor around campus at Emory University in Atlanta that visiting professors and new students are given a warning before going down a particular hallway in the psychology building. The purpose is to prevent them from dropping their belongings and ducking underneath a table after hearing what is unmistakably a human scream, explains Emory psychologist Harold Gouzoules.
It’s not that anyone is conducting sinister experiments, he adds; it’s simply that in this hallway, he and his team of “screamologists” are using recorded screams to investigate these well-known but poorly understood vocalizations.
Gouzoules has been interested in screams since 1980, when he began studying nonhuman animal vocalizations. Loosely defined as loud, high-pitched vocalizations often associated with distress, screams are found widely across the animal kingdom: in addition to humans and other primates, many species including rabbits and even caterpillars produce some sort of scream. Little is ...
