ArticleBMC psychology2016
Sex stereotypes influence adults' perception of babies' cries.
Article in BMC psychology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 40 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pride and pain - a lifespan-informed, identity-affirming approach to paediatric pain in 2SLGBTQIA+ youth: panel discussion at the international symposium for pediatric pain.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Nonlinear acoustic phenomena tune the adults' facial thermal response to baby cries with the cry amplitude envelope.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Humans need auditory experience to produce typical volitional nonverbal vocalizations.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Puppy whines mediate maternal behavior in domestic dogs.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Infant cries convey both stable and dynamic information about age and identity.Communications psychology · 2023Article
- Using CCA-Fused Cepstral Features in a Deep Learning-Based Cry Diagnostic System for Detecting an Ensemble of Pathologies in Newborns.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- An Entropy-Based Architecture for Detection of Sepsis in Newborn Cry Diagnostic Systems.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Individual differences in human voice pitch are preserved from speech to screams, roars and pain cries.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Human roars communicate upper-body strength more effectively than do screams or aggressive and distressed speech.PloS one · 2019Article
- Voice pitch modulation in human mate choice.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- The pitch of babies' cries predicts their voice pitch at age 5.Biology letters · 2018Article
- Human Listeners Can Accurately Judge Strength and Height Relative to Self from Aggressive Roars and Speech.iScience · 2018Article
- Seven and up: individual differences in male voice fundamental frequency emerge before puberty and remain stable throughout adulthood.Royal Society open science · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundDespite widespread evidence that gender stereotypes influence human parental behavior, their potential effects on adults' perception of babies' cries have been overlooked. In particular, whether adult listeners overgeneralize the sex dimorphism that characterizes the voice of adult speakers (men are lower-pitched than women) to their perception of babies' cries has not been investigated.
methodsWe used playback experiments combining natural and re-synthesised cries of 3 month-old babies to investigate whether the interindividual variation in the fundamental frequency (pitch) of cries affected adult listeners' identification of the baby's sex, their perception the baby's femininity and masculinity, and whether these biases interacted with their perception of the level of discomfort expressed by the cry.
resultsWe show that low-pitched cries are more likely to be attributed to boys and high-pitched cries to girls, despite the absence of sex differences in pitch. Moreover, low-pitched boys are perceived as more masculine and high-pitched girls are perceived as more feminine. Finally, adult men rate relatively low-pitched cries as expressing more discomfort when presented as belonging to boys than to girls.
conclusionSuch biases in caregivers' responses to babies' cries may have implications on children's immediate welfare and on the development of their gender identity.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.