Abstract
Crying is the most powerful auditory signal of infant need. Adults’ ability to perceive and respond to crying is important for infant survival and in the provision of care. This study investigated a number of listener variables that might impact on adults’ perception of infant cry distress, namely parental status, musical training, and empathy. Sensitivity to infant distress was tested using a previously validated task, which experimentally manipulated distress by varying the pitch of infant cries. This task required that participants discriminate between pitch differences and interpret these as differences in infant distress. Parents with musical training showed a significant advantage on this task when compared with parents without. The extent of the advantage was correlated with the amount of self-reported musical training. For non-parents, individual differences in empathy were associated with task performance, with higher empathy scores corresponding to greater sensitivity to infant distress. We suggest that sensitivity to infant distress can be impacted by a number of listener variables, and may be amenable to training.
Highlights
Crying is a powerful communicator of infant need
This study investigated a number of listener variables that might impact on adults’ perception of infant cry distress, namely parental status, musical training, and empathy
We aimed to examine the effects of parental status, empathy, and musical training on the perception of distress in infant cries
Summary
Parents’ capacity to perceive and respond to infant communication is an important determinant of the quality of early care (Parsons et al, 2010) This is important because there is good evidence that early caregiving shapes infant development across a range of domains including cognitive, social, and emotional functioning (Raviv et al, 2004; Sohr-Preston and Scaramella, 2006; Stein et al, 2008). A number of acoustic parameters within infant cries have been identified that provide information as to the infant’s current physiological and affective state. These include pitch, duration, onset, and pauses (for review, see Soltis, 2004). Evidence for the role of pitch as a marker of infant distress comes from studies examining adults’ perception of infant emotion in natural contexts (e.g., Zeskind and Collins, 1987), studies that experimentally manipulate pitch and measure adults’
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