Temperamental daily crying behaviors and acoustic cry characteristics of infants.

• In Event: Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Temperament is the basic aspect of the psychological mechanism of behavioral functioning (Thomas & Chess, 2013). Crying is a complex neurophysiological behavior that expresses the needs of an infant. Parents or caregivers must be sensitive to the reason, frequency, duration, and even voice-related characteristics of the infant's crying in order to respond to the infant's needs effectively. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between the infant's temperament (mother's score on the Chinese Infant Temperament Scale) and the infant's daily crying in the infant care center by analyzing the infant's crying behaviors and acoustic cry characteristics. Seven infants (4 boys) age 3 to 8 months participated in this study. We recorded 9 days of video and audio data in an infant care center. A total of 455 episodes with the infant crying were randomly assigned into three sets. Six observers (with early childhood education background) were assigned to three groups in pairs, and to code episodes as crying events by NOVA behavior analyzing tool. Observer reliability of each group was 0.83, 0.71 and 0.89. The frequency and duration of infants’ crying due to six physiological needs (hunger, full appetite, sleepy, not sleepy, and not sleep well) and two emotional needs (angry and attachment) were analyzed. Every infants' crying audios were extracted to the voice-related low-level descriptors (LLD) by the openSMILE toolkit and calculated with mean to be a representation for each sample. To investigate the possible relation between infant temperament and crying behavior or acoustic cry characteristics correlational analyses were carried out between temperament dimensions (the higher the dimension scores the more negative the temperament rating) and dependent variables. The results were shown in Table 1 and Table 2. There were inconsistent findings between crying behaviors and acoustic cry characteristics. The results of crying behavior shown that the frequency or duration of infants crying when they were hungry or sleepy in the infant care center related to their activity level, adaptability, and mood, in addition, the frequency of infants crying when they anger associate with their persistence. The results of the crying acoustic characteristics shown that the characteristics of infants crying when they need love in the infant care centers related to their activity and adaptability, in addition, the characteristics of infants crying when they hungry or not sleepy associated with their rhythmicity. Hungry cries characteristics also related to persistence. These findings suggested that activity level, adaptively, and persistence were the temperament dimensions that most associated with the infant's crying behaviors and acoustic cry characteristics. This study considered both crying behavior categories and acoustic cry characteristics in daily life (rather than in specific situations, such as pain or fear), and preliminary research results could provide information for parents and caregivers to think about how to interact with infants appropriately from different aspects.

Authors

• Hsiang-Chun Chen, National Tsing Hua University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yi Tang, college of education
  Presenting Author

• Chi-Chun Lee, National Tsing-Hua University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chun-Min Chang, National Tsing-Hua University
  Non-Presenting Author