Positive implicit association to human babies’ vocalization

Abstract

Cuteness in infants has mainly been associated with their morphological facial features. Infant cuteness promotes social interaction, empathy, and caregiving behaviors. It has been suggested that cuteness could go beyond the visual aspect to infants’ auditory and olfactory characteristics. The current research examines whether there is a positive valence toward babies’ neutral vowel vocalizations. Adult participants completed four Single Category Implicit Association Tasks (SC-IAT) using baby, adult, kitten, and cat vocalizations. Baby and adult vocalizations were vowels synthesized using VLAM. In this task, adults had to sort positive and negative written words and the vocalizations in the correct category; response times were measured. Preliminary results (response time) show that infant voices were associated with positive dimensions (M = 0.27), whereas adult (M = 0.06), cat (M = 0.07), and kitten (M = 0.08) showed neither a positive nor negative implicit association. A similar study testing facial features obtained comparable results (Senese et al., 2013). These findings point to a positive implicit association to babies’ vocalizations, suggesting that there is an auditory cuteness component specific to human infants. We will also discuss ongoing work focused on elucidating the acoustic characteristics that specify auditory cuteness, the role it plays in infant development, and the underlying neural mechanisms.