ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2025
Vocal communication and perception of pain in childbirth vocalizations.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Understanding and engaging with vocalisations during labour and birth: A qualitative interview study of midwives' experiences and approaches.International journal of nursing studies advances · 2026Article
- Overcoming Shame to Vocalise During Childbirth: A Qualitative Interview Study.Journal of advanced nursing · 2026Article
- Nurse Midwives' Perspectives on Women's Vocalization During the First and Second Stages of Labor: A Qualitative Study.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Article
- Nonlinear phenomena in animal vocalizations: do they reflect alternative functional modes of voice control, 'leaked' cues to quality or condition, or both?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- How to analyse and manipulate nonlinear phenomena in voice recordings.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Nonlinear acoustic phenomena affect the perception of pain in human baby cries.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Singing out of tune: sexual and developmental differences in the occurrence of nonlinear phenomena in primate songs.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Nonlinear phenomena in vertebrate vocalizations: mechanisms and communicative functions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Vocal communication and perception of pain in childbirth vocalizations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Acoustic context and dynamics of nonlinear phenomena in mammalian calls: the case of puppy whines.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Nonlinear vocal phenomena and speech intelligibility.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
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Abstract
Nonlinear acoustic phenomena (NLP) likely facilitate the expression of distress in animal vocalizations, making calls perceptually rough and hard to ignore. Yet, their function in adult human vocal communication remains poorly understood. Here, to examine the production and perception of acoustic correlates of pain in spontaneous human nonverbal vocalizations, we take advantage of childbirth-a natural context in which labouring women typically produce a range of highly evocative loud vocalizations, including moans and screams-as they experience excruciating pain. We combine acoustic analyses of these real-life pain vocalizations with psychoacoustic experiments involving the playback of natural and synthetic calls to both naïve and expert listeners. We show that vocalizations become acoustically rougher, higher in fundamental frequency (pitch), less stable, louder and longer as child labour progresses, paralleling a rise in women's self-assessed pain. In perception experiments, we show that both naïve listeners and obstetric professionals assign the highest pain ratings to vocalizations produced in the final expulsion phase of labour. Experiments with synthetic vocal stimuli confirm that listeners rely largely on nonlinear phenomena to assess pain. Our study confirms that nonlinear phenomena communicate intense, pain-induced distress in humans, consistent with their widespread function to signal distress and arousal in vertebrate vocal signals.This article is part of the theme issue 'Nonlinear phenomena in vertebrate vocalizations: mechanisms and communicative functions'.
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