Whines, cries, and motherese: Their relative power to distract.

Abstract

There is ample support for the ability of motherese and infant cries, and more recently whining, to attract the attention of listeners. Similarly, Morsbach, McCulloch & Clark (1986) showed that infant cries were better at distracting listeners who were instructed to pay attention to a simple cognitive task. As an extension of this early study, the current study examined the ability of whines, cries, and motherese to distract listeners. All participants completed a series of simple subtraction problems while listening to these three attachment vocalizations as well as to machine noise, neutral speech, and silence (non-attachment controls). Distraction was measured in terms of number of subtraction problems completed, errors made, and a proportion score of errors to problems completed, for each condition. Participants, regardless of gender or parental status, were more distracted when listening to attachment vocalizations than silence as measured by number of problems completed, and were more distracted by whines than machine noise or motherese as measured by proportion scores. In absolute numbers, participants were most distracted by whines, followed by infant cries and motherese. We consider this study further evidence that whines, cries, and motherese are all part of an attachment vocalization system that exploit an auditory sensitivity shared by humans.

Young adults’ reactions to infant crying

“…Earlier studies have argued that both negative emotions and cognitive disturbance in reaction to infant crying would lead to prompt and appropriate caregiving (Chang & Thompson, 2011;De Pisapia et al, 2013;Morsbach et al, 1986). Our hypothesis was that both these reactions would occur in our participants, possibly because they share the same underlying mechanism designed to prompt caregiving.…”

“…For example, cortisol levels naturally rise throughout the second and third trimester of pregnancy (Carr, Parker, Madden, MacDonald, & Porter, 1981), and mothers with higher cortisol levels have been found to show more sympathetic responses to infant crying (Stallings, Fleming, Corter, Worthman, & Steiner, 2001). On the other hand, there are also studies showing that childless adults react similarly to parents to the sound of infant crying (e.g., Chang et al, 2011;Riem, Bakermans-Kranenburg, van Ijzendoorn, Out, & Rombouts, 2012), suggesting a more general predisposition to react to infant crying, regardless of parental status. For example, listening to infant crying improved motor performance in both parents and childless adults (Parsons, Young, Parsons, Stein, & Kringelbach, 2012).…”

“…Leerkes, Parade, and Gudmundson (2011) found that the emotional reaction of mothers to infant crying can range from sad to irritated, to extremely hostile. Such reactions presumably compel the caregiver to react promptly and trigger appropriate caregiving efforts (Chang & Thompson, 2011).…”

Spatial sound and its effect on visual quality perception and task performance within a virtual environment

“…With respect to task completion time, our results are also contrary to previous work that has examined performance in the presence of sound and music. For example, a study by Chang and Thompson (2011) demonstrated that whines, cries, and "child-directed speech" distracted listeners completing simple mathematical (subtraction) problems. Similarly, Woods et al (2011) discovered that sound (noise) can have an effect on the perception of food gustatory properties, food crunchiness and food liking, while Conrad et al (2010) discovered that stressful music (e.g., heavy metal music) had a negative impact on the time required to complete a laparoscopic surgery task but did not impact task accuracy while classical music had a variable effect on the time required to complete the task but resulted in greater task accuracy.…”

Prenatal Predictors of Postnatal Quality of Caregiving Behavior in Mothers and Fathers

“…We investigated whether the extent to which infant crying interferes with expectant parents' cognitive performance predicts their postnatal caregiving quality. We assumed that cognitive interference by infant crying would mean that the infant's signal is detected, triggering caregiving behavior (Chang & Thompson, 2011). The effect on caregiving quality may, however, be positive or negative.…”