What's the difference between alarm and startle?

Alarm


Definition:

  • (n.) A summons to arms, as on the approach of an enemy.
  • (n.) Any sound or information intended to give notice of approaching danger; a warning sound to arouse attention; a warning of danger.
  • (n.) A sudden attack; disturbance; broil.
  • (n.) Sudden surprise with fear or terror excited by apprehension of danger; in the military use, commonly, sudden apprehension of being attacked by surprise.
  • (n.) A mechanical contrivance for awaking persons from sleep, or rousing their attention; an alarum.
  • (v. t.) To call to arms for defense; to give notice to (any one) of approaching danger; to rouse to vigilance and action; to put on the alert.
  • (v. t.) To keep in excitement; to disturb.
  • (v. t.) To surprise with apprehension of danger; to fill with anxiety in regard to threatening evil; to excite with sudden fear.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) More evil than Clocky , the alarm clock that rolls away when you reach out to silence it, or the Puzzle Alarm , which makes you complete a simple puzzle before it'll go quiet, the Money Shredding Alarm Clock methodically destroys your cash unless you rouse yourself.
  • (2) Which must make yesterday's jobs figures doubly alarming for the coalition.
  • (3) Luciana Berger, Labour shadow secretary for mental health, also expressed alarm.
  • (4) The Cambridge-based couple felt ignored when tried to raise the alarm about the way their business – publisher Zenith – was treated by Lynden Scourfield, the former HBOS banker jailed last week, and David Mills’ Quayside Corporate Services.
  • (5) Not only was an alarming amount of fissile material going missing at the company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec), but it had been visited by a veritable who's-who of Israeli intelligence, including Rafael Eitan, described by the firm as an Israeli defence ministry "chemist", but, in fact, a top Mossad operative who went on to head Lakam.
  • (6) Talking ahead of a UN climate summit in Peru next month, Kim said he was alarmed by World Bank-commissioned research from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, which said that as a result of past greenhouse gas emissions the world is condemned to unprecedented weather events.
  • (7) The most egregious failure was by WHO in the delay in sounding the alarm,” said Prof Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.
  • (8) "We are alarmed to see the government is even wavering about continuing its programme of tracing, testing and destroying infected young ash trees.
  • (9) Privacy advocates argue this reflects an alarming ease of access, even though agencies should make every effort to ensure the invasion of privacy is justified by the importance to the public of solving a crime or recovering money.
  • (10) There was no looking back and as Hardouvelis nervously looked on – at times relieved, at times alarmed – it was quite clear that there was no stepping back either.
  • (11) Suffice to say, it was a long, difficult haul with various scares and alarms along the way.
  • (12) Severe overloading can increase microdamage alarmingly, its repair by BMUs too, and can cause woven bone formation, anarchic resorption and a regional acceleratory phenomenon.
  • (13) The literature on the possible risk of myasthenia gravis complicating pregnancy and delivery is sparse and partly contradictory but some of the reports on the number of perinatal and neonatal deaths are alarming.
  • (14) The second cause for alarm is more real – the insistence on imposing exemplary, or punitive, damages on those who don't join the regulator (and, in some circumstances, even those who do).
  • (15) The stimulus-response combination was classified into 4 categories according to SDT response: hits, misses, false alarms (FAs) and correct rejections (CRs).
  • (16) The interval distributions of neurons in isolated cerebral cortex resembled those of neurons in the intact cortex of an alarmed animal.
  • (17) The clinicians were asked to choose from a list the device that produced the alarm.
  • (18) On Monday, the interior minister, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, said the alarm had been raised immediately, but local media have cited prison sources saying it took half an hour for police to begin the search for Guzmán.
  • (19) The bank's speciality in debt instruments such as mortgage-related securities caused alarm as early as last summer.
  • (20) in the US the last ten years have witnessed an alarming recrudescence involving vast strata of the population and especially children, although this is masked by the paucity of reports, as is the case also in Italy.

Startle


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To move suddenly, or be excited, on feeling alarm; to start.
  • (v. t.) To excite by sudden alarm, surprise, or apprehension; to frighten suddenly and not seriously; to alarm; to surprise.
  • (v. t.) To deter; to cause to deviate.
  • (n.) A sudden motion or shock caused by an unexpected alarm, surprise, or apprehension of danger.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) These later results suggest that dopamine agonists increase sensorimotor reactivity measured with acoustic startle by acting on sensory rather than motor parts of the reflex arc.
  • (2) The hypothesis that the standard acoustic startle habituation paradigm contains the elements of Pavlovian fear conditioning was tested.
  • (3) But that promise was beginning to startle the markets, which admire Monti’s appetite for austerity and fear the free spending and anti-European views of some Italian politicians.
  • (4) Both startle amplitude and onset latency showed significantly greater facilitation in the preschool children than in the 8-year-olds and adults.
  • (5) flexion, stretch, rolling, startle, jumping (stepping), and writhing.
  • (6) Three response patterns were scored: (1) no startle, (2) startle without response decrement, and (3) response decrement by 12 stimuli.
  • (7) More importantly, motor and cardiovascular responses to startle may be separated through discrimination of afferent stimuli suggesting either differences in neural pathways for acoustic and tactile stimuli or a differential dependency of the various responses on stimulus characteristics.
  • (8) The startle-elicited increase in blood pressure was significantly elevated in SHRs and at the same time the acoustic startle response was depressed as compared to WKY rats.
  • (9) A placebo effect could not definitely be ruled out, but the startling changes seen in patients who had been followed for years with other forms of therapy suggest strongly that this improvement was genuine.
  • (10) In general, conditions that affect the amplitude of the acoustic startle reflex similarly influence the disruptive effect of a noise burst on motor performance, but the two measures are not correlated in the detail necessary to suggest a causative relationship.
  • (11) The results are compared to other drugs known to affect the startle reflex.
  • (12) In awake rats the latency of auditory startle recorded electromyographically in the neck is about 5 ms, suggesting that the primary component of this brainstem reflex is mediated by a neural circuit with only a few synapses.
  • (13) A series of seven experiments related amplitude and latency of the pigeon's startle response, elicited by an intense visual stimulus, to antecedent auditory and visual events in the sensory environment.
  • (14) The acoustic startle response (ASR) of male rats was measured during several sessions over a 24-hr period in both a light-dark cycle and a constant-dark condition.
  • (15) That dramatically shifts the focus back to us, the programme makers, to come up with more, new, startling ideas, absolutely unmissable storylines and settings, the sharpest writing.
  • (16) Because ammocoetes are burrowing filter feeders, this startle behavior results in rapid withdrawal of the head into the burrow.
  • (17) Startle was indexed by the eyeblink, which was measured by vertical electro-oculography.
  • (18) In the present work no significant differences were found between the behaviour of FG7142-kindled rats and vehicle-treated controls in social interaction test, elevated plus maze, or the Vogel conflict test of anxiety or in tests of home cage aggression or startle responses.
  • (19) The first attempted to determine a sonic boom level below which startle would not occurr.
  • (20) It is able to (1) sample startle responses from 5 animals simultaneously during a specific time band after the eliciting stimulus; (2) convert the analogue startle amplitudes into 2-digit numbers; (3) print the digital results of each startle in each animal; (4) add up the startle amplitudes for each rat over a preset number of stimuli and print the totals; (5) print the interstimulus interval and (6) code for up to six diferent types of trials.