Screaming, yelling, whining, and crying: categorical and intensity differences in vocal expressions of anger and sadness in children's tantrums

Abstract

Young children's temper tantrums offer a unique window into the expression and regulation of strong emotions. Previous work, largely based on parental report, suggests that two emotions, anger and sadness, have different behavioral manifestations and different time courses within tantrums. Individual motor and vocal behaviors, reported by parents, have been interpreted as representing different levels of intensity within each emotion category. The present study used high-fidelity audio recordings to capture the acoustic features of children's vocalizations during tantrums. Results indicated that perceptually categorized screaming, yelling, crying, whining, and fussing each have distinct acoustic features. Screaming and yelling form a group with similar acoustic features while crying, whining, and fussing form a second acoustically related group. Within these groups, screaming may reflect a higher intensity of anger than yelling while fussing, whining, and crying may reflect an increasing intensity of sadness.

Figure 1

Sample spectrograms of fuss, whine, and cry, (left column, reading down) and yell and scream (right column, reading down). Duration is on the X axis (and varies by type of sound) and frequency is on the Y-axis (from 0 to 5000 Hz with grid lines every 1000 Hz). Darkness of lines indicated more energy in that frequency range. See text for description of acoustic characteristics of each type of vocalization.

Figure 2

Distribution of scores for low intensity (fuss and whine) and high intensity sounds (cry, yell, and scream) on the discriminant function. Note that there is almost no overlap in scores, and the classification accuracy is 93%. See text for a description of the variables loading on the discriminant function.

Figure 3

Group centroids for fuss, whine, cry, yell, and scream in discriminant 3-space. See text for descriptions of the 3 discriminant functions.

Figure 4

Distributions of fuss, whine, cry, yell, and scream (10th to 90^th percentiles encircled) in the discriminant plane of Function 1 and Function 3.

Figure 5

Melody contours for each type of vocalization. F₀ was measured at 10 equally-spaced points in each sound, and each value in each sound was subtracted from the mean F₀ for that sound.