Music training and empathy positively impact adults’ sensitivity to infant distress

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.

The neural basis of responsive caregiving behaviour: Investigating temporal dynamics within the parental brain

“…A number of studies have demonstrated that higher pitched cries are perceived as sounding 'more distressed' and as having 'greater arousal' by adult listeners, with and without parenting experience [26][27][28][29].…”

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On Cuteness: Unlocking the Parental Brain and Beyond

“…For example, the “baby-social-reward-task”, which uses cute sounds and faces, mimics important aspects of caregiving and has been able to shift perceptions of infant temperament [27, 85]. Musical training has also been implicated in sensitivity and empathy for infant distress [79, 86], in that specific training has improved caregiver sensitivity. Such targeted behavioural paradigms based on neuroscientific research may eventually help to increase caregivers’ ability to properly interpret infant signals and provide appropriate responses.…”

Motion and emotion: depression reduces psychomotor performance and alters affective movements in caregiving interactions

“…However, measures of motivational salience (“wanting”) have found no differences between men and women in their ‘willingness to work’ to view images of infants (Parsons et al, 2011a ; however, see also Hahn et al, 2013 ). In the auditory domain, women and men are similar in their explicit appraisal of infant vocalisations, reporting similar levels of perceived distress and desire to respond (Donate-Bartfield and Passman, 1985 ; Leger et al, 1996 ; Parsons et al, 2014b , c ). There is mixed evidence on whether there are gender differences in physiological reactions to infant cries, with findings demonstrating greater reactivity in women than men (Wiesenfeld et al, 1981 ; Furedy et al, 1989 ) or greater reactivity in men than women (Brewster et al, 1998 ; Out et al, 2010 ).…”