Adult heart‐rate responses to infant cry sounds

Abstract

Thirty male and female adults who had no children of their own nor any professional experience with children listened to tape‐recorded pain cries of newborn infants who varied in their biomedical risk status. Heart‐rate responses to the cries were classified as predominantly acceleratory, deceleratory or flat in character. Whereas the pain cries of ‘normal’ low risk infants mostly elicited heart‐rate accelerations, the unusually high pitched pain cries of infants at increased risk for non‐optimal development elicited either heart‐rate accelerations or decelerations, depending on the individual listener. Independent of the direction of the cardiac response, the cries of high risk infants elicited greater absolute heart‐rate change from baseline than the cry sounds of low risk infants. These results support the findings of previous studies in which ‘normal’ pain cries were rated along one perceptual dimension describing the aversive nature of the cry sound, and the unusually high pitched pain cries were perceived along two orthogonal dimensions‐one indicating that the cry was aversive, the other that the infant sounded sick. The different heart‐rate reactions may provide the basis for differences in adult responses which influence the infant' developmental pathway.