Study: Understanding baby's cries of pain is not an innate ability

A new study has found the answer to whether adults understand when a baby is in pain as opposed to being mildly uncomfortable.

The findings of the study were reported in the journal Current Biology. “We found that the ability to detect pain in cries--that is, to identify a pain cry from a mere discomfort cry--is modulated by experience of caring for babies,” says Nicolas Mathevon, University of Saint-Etienne, France. “Current parents of young babies can identify a baby's pain cries even if they have never heard this baby before, whereas inexperienced individuals are typically unable to do so.”

The findings show that humans' ability to interpret babies' cries isn't innate but learned from experience. Parenting young babies shapes our ability to decode the information conveyed by babies' communication signals. Mathevon and his University of Saint-Etienne colleagues including David Reby and Roland Peyron made this discovery as part of a broader research program investigating how information is encoded in babies' cries and how human listeners extract this information. In the new study, they wanted to find out how prior caregiving experience with babies shaped the ability to identify when they were in pain.