ArticleScientific reports2020
The 'Threat of Scream' paradigm: a tool for studying sustained physiological and subjective anxiety.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 28 citations in OpenAlex.
- Brain-Wave Music: A Personalized Approach to Improving Anxiety Resistance.Neural plasticity · 2025Trial
- The Emotional Experience of Time: Effects of Anxiety and Interoceptive Ability on Temporal Perception.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- A Virtual Reality-Based Multimodal Approach to Diagnosing Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia Using Physiological Measures: A Machine Learning Study.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Differential neural decoding of alarm and avoidance information from vocal alarm calls in humans.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Rough is salient: a conserved vocal niche to hijack the brain's salience system.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Hypercapnia Reduces Perceived Heat Pain in Healthy Subjects.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2025Article
- The effect of anxiety on gait: a threat-of-scream study.Psychological research · 2024Article
- The Role of Expectancy Violation in Extinction Learning: A Two-Day Online Fear Conditioning Study.Clinical psychology in Europe · 2023Article
- Recognition memory, primacy vs. recency effects, and time perception in the online version of the fear of scream paradigm.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Dynamic Tracking of State AnxietyFrontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Progress in understanding the emergence of pathological anxiety depends on the availability of paradigms effective in inducing anxiety in a simple, consistent and sustained manner. The Threat-of-Shock paradigm has typically been used to elicit anxiety, but poses ethical issues when testing vulnerable populations. Moreover, it is not clear from past studies whether anxiety can be sustained in experiments of longer durations. Here, we present empirical support for an alternative approach, the 'Threat-of-Scream' paradigm, in which shocks are replaced by screams. In two studies, participants were repeatedly exposed to blocks in which they were at risk of hearing aversive screams at any time vs. blocks in which they were safe from screams. Contrary to previous 'Threat-of-Scream' studies, we ensured that our screams were neither harmful nor intolerable by presenting them at low intensity. We found higher subjective reports of anxiety, higher skin conductance levels, and a positive correlation between the two measures, in threat compared to safe blocks. These results were reproducible and we found no significant change over time. The unpredictable delivery of low intensity screams could become an essential part of a psychology toolkit, particularly when investigating the impact of anxiety in a diversity of cognitive functions and populations.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.