Perception of Infant Crying as an Interpersonal Event

Abstract

Recent studies have examined the infant cry as one form of preverbal, interpersonal communication. Emphasis has been on the cry as an adaptive distress signal evolved to elicit nurturing and protective responses from adults in the surrounding environment. Murray (1979) indicated that there are two basic types of information in any cry signal, the “categorical” and the “affective,” or motivational, message. The distinction between categorical and affective information derives from the distinction between lexical and prosodic features of speech. Prosodic features, timing, amplitude, and fundamental frequency, convey the affective message in the cry (Lester,1982). Categorical information refers directly to known predisposing conditions associated with crying, and generally the cause of crying is presumed to be physical rather than psychological. In order to examine the categorical information in cries, a typology of cries was developed by obtaining cry samples from infants in known conditions (3 hours from last feed = hunger cry; first cry after being born = birth cry) and then studying the ability of adults to identify the type of cry (Wasz-Höckert, Lind, Vuorenkoski, Partanen, & Valanne, 1986). The focus of this research has been on adult’s ability to identify correctly the type of cry from a range of several alternatives rather than on assumptions about affective quality or self-report about how the cry was experiences by the listener.