Listening to infant distress vocalizations enhances effortful motor performance

Young adults’ reactions to infant crying

“…Our hypothesis was that both these reactions would occur in our participants, possibly because they share the same underlying mechanism designed to prompt caregiving. This was supported by the fact that, in a previous study, listening to infant crying improved motor performance, which was also argued to reflect facilitation in caregiving (Parsons et al, 2012). However, our results showed that the negative emotions after a working memory task were not related to cognitive performance in this task when participants were subjected to infant crying during the task.…”

“…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). According to the authors, this may facilitate caregiving behavior, hence constituting an adaptive reaction to crying.…”

“…According to the authors, this may facilitate caregiving behavior, hence constituting an adaptive reaction to crying. In addition, childless adults, as well as parents, react to infant crying with physiological arousal, including increases in heart rate, skin conductance, and blood pressure (Parsons et al, 2012).…”

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

“…At the behavioural level, both listening to infant cries and looking at infant faces promotes a self-reported desire to enact caregiving responses in adult listeners [32,73,102]. Hearing infant cries has also been shown to significantly increase the speed of motor responses on an effortful motor task [103,104]. Similarly, viewing infant faces promotes effortful responding in adults, as demonstrated through key-pressing tasks [105].…”

Neurobiology of culturally common maternal responses to infant cry

“…From the moment of birth, certain signals from babies effectively influence parenting: Infant cries motivate adults to approach and to act (7,8). That is, infant cries and caregiver responses to them constitute an integrated dyadic system that encompasses the infant production of cries as well as the adult anatomy (9-12), physiology (5, 13), and perception, processing, and response apparatus to cries (2,4,5,(14)(15)(16)(17). Cries put both infant and caregiver in states of strong mutual nervous system activation and increase the probability of behavioral attunement (18).…”