An ethological analysis of human infant crying: Answering Tinbergen's four questions

Abstract

The proximate causes, survival value, ontogeny, and evolutionary history of human infant crying are examined. Experiments and field observations involving infant distress vocalizations and begging calls in avian, mammalian, and nonhuman primate species are considered, as are ethnographic records of infant care and responses to crying in nonindustrialized societies. It is argued that human infant crying evolved as a primarily acoustic, graded signal, that it is a fairly reliable, if imperfect, indicator of need for parental care and that its primary function is to promote parental caregiving. Selection pressures that may have shaped the evolution of crying and its potential for corruption through dishonesty also are discussed.

Age-Related Changes in the Signal Value of Tears

“…Nonetheless, younger crying faces garnered high sympathy ratings and provoked high rates of hypothetical intervention. The paradoxical effects of infant and child crying on listeners have been noted elsewhere (Barr, 1990b;Zeifman, 2001b). The current findings suggest that these paradoxical effects are elicited even without the acoustic element of crying, typically considered its most noxious feature (Murray, 1985;Owings and Zeifman, 2004).…”

The animal nature of spontaneous human laughter

“…Some level of deception is clearly occurring, with normal volitional laughs being judged as real on average 37% of the time suggesting the presence of a co-evolutionary arms race that likely shaped senders and receivers of a variety of volitionally controlled vocal signals, including cries, shrieks, sexual orgasm calls, and laughter. Theorists have previously proposed an arms race scenario for smiling ) and crying (Lummaa, Vuorisalo, Barr, & Lehtonen, 1998;Zeifman, 2001), among others. Though these vocal signals differ with regard to pitch, duration, and other dimensions, they might all have a spontaneous "instinctive" (Provine, 2012) version of the call as well as a volitionally produced version that mimics certain aspects of the phylogenetically older spontaneous call.…”

Actions speak louder than words: An elaborated theoretical model of the social functions of self-injury and other harmful behaviors

“…Crying is perhaps most often conceptualized as a behavioral signal of distress that serves a social function in the form of eliciting caregiving behavior from others (Blumberg & Sokoloff, 2001;Hendriks, Rottenberg, & Vingerhoets, 2007;Zeifman, 2001). Crying can be thought of as a handicap as well given that it is difficult to fake, costly to produce in that it blurs vision, and it leaves a physical trace once engaged (Hauser, 1996).…”