If you can recognize this audio as the cry of a baby in pain, you are most likely a parent of a young child. At least that’s what a study published this week in the scientific journal Current Biology indicates. According to research, the ability to differentiate painful moments from uncomfortable situations is not innate, but a result of experience. Parents and caregivers learn with practice to decode the signals present in crying.
The article shows that adults with extensive experience with infants, whether as parents or child care professionals, identify the crying of familiar children at a higher rate than chance. But only parents of young children, those involved in intensive care day and night, are able to differentiate discomfort and pain in a baby they have never had contact with, something unexpected by scientists.
They imagined that, like parents, childcare professionals would also be successful in the task of recognizing the signs of unfamiliar babies, since they tend to have contact with many children during a working day, however this was not the case. .
“This surprised us at first, but it is consistent with the idea that experienced listeners can develop a resistance that reduces their sensitivity to acoustic pain signals,” says Camille Fauchon, co-author of the article and a researcher at the University of Saint-Etienne, in France.
The research is part of a research program dedicated to understanding how information is encoded in babies’ cries and how adults extract this information. “Before a child can speak, it is essential to understand their signals so that their needs are met: is they hungry, sleepy, or in pain? In particular, detecting and assessing babies’ pain is necessary to manage any medical issues.” says Fauchon.
The researcher states that the current pain assessment scales based on the baby’s facial expressions and behavior, and on information reported by the parents, are incomplete and imprecise, hence the importance of understanding the information encoded in the acoustic structure of infant crying.
The pain cry is longer, louder and more shrill, and the study sought to understand whether the experience affected the ability to decode these universal acoustic properties. To this end, the researchers recruited participants with different levels of contact with infants, including unfamiliar people, casual caregivers, parents of children over 5 years of age, and parents of children under 2 years of age.
The experiment was conducted over the internet, using the Prolific platform, and participants received payment for the time spent. “This format guarantees a certain level of motivation, which is always difficult in online initiatives, without becoming a complete source of income. It is also an interesting solution for carrying out experiments when people cannot enter the laboratory, as was the case during the lockdown by Covid”, argues Fauchon.
After recruitment, a training phase began. In two days, the 234 participants listened to eight audios of discomfort captured during the bath of the same baby, to familiarize themselves with the child. Afterwards, they were presented with a sequence of four audios, two referring to discomfort and two cries of pain captured during vaccination moments. Finally, they heard four more audios, also of pain and discomfort, from a baby they had not heard until then.
Participants who were not parents had a hit rate close to 50% when listening to the baby they were familiar with, while parents of children over 5 years old reached 65.5%. Child care professionals reached 71.1% and parents of babies, 71.2%. They also had a 64.2% hit rate when hearing the cry of an unfamiliar baby, showing that experience influences perception.
“We are now interested in studying the neurobiological underpinnings of these perceptual processes. We have neuroimaging studies underway that will help to understand how experience and parenthood shape brain activity and make adults become experts in recognizing babies’ cries. we are investigating how demographic factors, including age, can affect the cry identification process”, concludes the researcher.
