The Baby Cry Schema And Its Influencing Mechanism

Lorenz proposed "baby scheme" hypothesis to characterize attractive infant features and, cry is one of the most significant features during infancy. Accumulated studies suggest infant cry has a significant effect on adult’s sympathetic nervous system, emotion and cargiving behavior. Moreover, infant age and cry acoustics as two main variables will affect the extent of adult’s response. However, there is a dearth of research exploring the cry from children beyond infancy to test whether the cry effect will extend beyond infancy and whether age and cry acoustics will continuously play their part. To test the assumption two experiments has been performed.In the first experiment, we examined adults’ evaluations of perception and caregiving motivation of cries from infancy to early childhood. Then tested the effects of cry age and cry acoustics on adult’s response. It was revealed that both infant cry and children’s cry exhibited baby schema effect which verify the extent of baby schema effect. Furthermore, adult’s evaluations change acoustically with age. And it shows that the younger the cry, the more urgent and weak it was judged to be by adults, and more likely trigger the motivation of adults to cuddle, feed the cry sender promptly and unhesitatingly. Finally, it suggests that cry age, fundamental frequency (F0) and the first formant frequency (F1) mainly account for the variances of adult’s responses.In the second experiment, we employ the novelty oddball paradigm and ERP with high temporal resolution, we aimed to improve the assumption mentioned in experiment one with neurophysiological evidence. And, four kinds of stimuli were played by E-prime:Standard stimulus (500HZ pure tune/350Hz pure tune), target stimulus (350HZ pure tune/500Hz pure tune) and two kinds of novelty stimuli (infant cry and toddler cry). Firstly, the comparison between P3induced by target and P3induced by novelty indicates that children’s cry triggered the orienting response of adult participants. Secondly, the comparison between P3induced by infant cry and P3induced by toddler cry shows that both infant cry and toddler cry have the same effect of baby cry schema, which enhances the assumption proposed in our investigation that baby cry schema shall extend in older children’s cry.As for future research, we should keep carrying forward the investigation of baby cry schema, and investigate its further influencing mechanism, such as individual differences, cultural differences. And with high technique of ERP and FMRI, we shall investigate the brain mechanism of baby cry schema leading to get better knowledge on mother-infant attachment, children disease diagnosis and human attention.