Crying is the only way a baby has to communicate their discomfort, but they can cry for different reasons and parents need to know if their child is crying because they are hungry or sleepy, or because they are in pain. Can adults identify the most common reasons why a baby cries? The answer to this question, according to a new study, is that humans don’t have an innate ability to determine whether a baby’s crying is due to simple discomfort or pain, but experience caring for a baby teaches us to interpret this signal.
“We found that the ability to detect pain in crying, that is, to identify a pain cry from a simple discomfort cry, is modulated by experience in caring for babies,” said Nicolas Mathevon of the University of Saint -Etienne, in France. “Today’s parents of young babies can identify a baby’s cries of pain, even if they have never heard it before, whereas inexperienced people usually can’t.”
The results of the research, which has been published in Current Biology, show that raising young babies enables us to decode the information transmitted by the communication signals they emit. Mathevon and her colleagues were investigating how information is encoded in babies’ cries and how this information is extracted by listeners, and they wanted to know how experience caring for babies influenced the ability to identify when babies were in pain.
“Only parents of younger babies were also able to identify contexts of an unknown baby’s crying that they had never heard before.”
Mathevon and colleagues at the University of Saint-Etienne, including David Reby and Roland Peyron, made this discovery as part of a larger research program investigating how information is encoded in infant cries and how human listeners extract this information. In the new study, they wanted to find out how previous experience caring for babies shaped the ability to identify when they were in pain.
Babies’ cries contain relevant encoded information
People with different levels of babysitting experience participated in the research, from those with no experience at all, to parents of young children, and also some with occasional babysitting experience and individuals who had not. been parents, but had broader professional experience in childcare.
All of them received a brief training in which they listened to eight cries of discomfort from a baby for two days, and then tested their ability to decipher the cries as discomfort, or pain. They discovered that experience was key, since people with little or no experience were not able to appreciate the difference between the cries.
Parents and professionals did better than those who guessed it by chance, but the clear winners were the parents of younger babies, who were able to identify the infant’s crying contexts, even if they had never heard that child’s cries, while that parents of older children and those with professional experience did not have success with the cries of unknown children.
“Only parents of younger babies were also able to identify contexts of an unknown baby’s crying that they had never heard before,” said study first author Siloe Corvin. “Professional pediatric caregivers are less successful in extending this ability to unfamiliar babies,” says study co-author Camille Fauchon. “This was surprising at first, but it is consistent with the idea that experienced listeners may develop a resistance that decreases their sensitivity to acoustic pain signals.”
The study findings show that babies’ cries contain relevant information encoded in their acoustic structure but, although adults are tuned in to that information, our ability to decode it and detect when a baby is in pain improves with exposure and experience.
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