Screaming refers to a sound utterance at a high volume. Strong emotional feelings are usually associated with crying, and depending on the age of the person, crying has a different communicative meaning.
What is shouting?
Yelling refers to a sound expression at a high volume. Screaming is usually associated with strong emotional feelings. A cry is a sound expression of the human being in increased volume. Infants cry piercingly and persistently to draw attention to themselves and to secure the care of an adult. The older a person gets, the less he or she cries out for help; crying then turns into a warning signal or a means of communicating over long distances. The louder a person can scream, the farther away can be other people with whom he wants to communicate. In an evolutionary sense, this kind of vocalization also had a protective effect: the larger, more colorful and louder an enemy could show itself, the more threatening it was perceived to be. Screaming helped humans to appear threatening to enemies in battle and in defense. Even today, people shout in arguments, for example. Furthermore, shouting in adulthood is associated with strong emotional stirrings – intense anger, sadness or joy can lead to the elevation of voice volume to the point of shouting.
Function and task
Crying has a special meaning for newborns and infants. They cannot yet articulate themselves in clear words, and in the beginning they can hardly express different needs. Within a few weeks, parents learn to interpret their infant’s crying and recognize differences. An infant cries loudly and piercingly to secure the attention of adults, especially parents. The assumption is that the crying is intended to create a need in the parents to stop it – therefore, they satisfy the infant’s needs and learn themselves that the infant will then stop crying. Infants cry out of hunger, loneliness, or even pain. In infancy, crying transitions into the defiance phase, where toddlers learn to cope with feelings of anger and aggression. Later in life, children eventually cry out of strong feelings or pain. They learn that yelling can express dominance, which is why they often raise their voices in arguments or heated discussions. The more the young person learns to find his or her place in society, the more selectively he or she uses yelling when it is not purely for communication over long distances. In adulthood, shouting has a strategic use. It expresses dominance over the interlocutor and can be an outlet to control high emotional stress. While the pitch can still be controlled when shouting, this is no longer possible when actually shouting, so that in many cases the focus in adults is no longer on communication but on dealing with emotions in the process.
Illnesses and complaints
Already in infancy crying can become a problem. So-called cry babies cry more often and more than other babies their age. Sometimes their crying has a specific reason, while other crying babies cannot be calmed down by anything and cry for hours without being helped by their parents. In most cases, however, there is a tangible reason for the excessive crying, which a crying ambulance can track down in order to find a remedy. There may be physical causes such as pain that is not visible from the outside, sometimes a different way of handling the baby can reduce the crying. Cry babies usually develop this problem in the first weeks and months of life, more rarely excessive crying occurs in infancy. The defiant phase can again be difficult, as some children have a harder time than others learning how to deal with anger. The reason for their crying is then more comprehensible to the parents, but it still wears on the nerves no less and can put extreme strain on the parent-child relationship. In childhood and adulthood, frequent crying is usually due to problems coping with strong emotions such as anger and aggression. Those affected have not learned sufficiently to deal with this in childhood and now use loud crying as an outlet. Their problem is sometimes also associated with other aggressive behaviors, which they display more quickly than other people under comparable emotional stress.Such problems often occur for the first time in adolescence, but there are also children who react unusually aggressively. Less conspicuous are adults who are less aggressive, but who are unusually quick to shout at their interlocutor. They, too, have not learned to deal with emotions such as anger in a different way and therefore use the raised voice to easily achieve their dominance in the conversation. With targeted psychotherapy, they can be helped to express anger in socially acceptable ways and to find a less aggressive way of dealing with it in order to remain calmer in conversation with others. People who react often and quickly by yelling in conversation usually develop problems in everyday communication because of this, so they voluntarily seek treatment as soon as they recognize this connection.
