Parents know it: the cry of a small child is one of the sweetest and at the same time irritating sounds in the world. It makes us worry, nervous, stress, but not only: according to a study published on Journal of the Royal Society Interfacethe screams of pain of a child between 0 and 12 months have the power to increase our facial temperature, in a probable intent of making us run to his rescue.
NLP. The crying of a child are not all the same: there are complaints that mean “I am hungry”, and others with whom he wants to tell us “I’m sleepy”; And then there are those acute and disharmonious sounds called in English “Nonlinear Phenomena” (NLP), literally non -linear phenomenawhich are produced when the small contracts the thoracic case and emits high pressure air jets through the vocal cords.
Run to help me! Scholars analyzed the physiological effects of these sounds on adults: to do it, they involved 41 participants (21 men and 20 women of an average age of 35 years), and made them listen to them 23 audio tracks recorded by 16 different babies who cried for the bath or for the puncture of a vaccine.
All participants, indifferently from sex, showed an increase in facial temperature in response to the crying of the little ones: the greater the level of NLP (therefore of crying “of pain”), the greater the increase in the temperature of the face of the one who listened. This means that these chaotic sounds are made on purpose to recall the attention of an adult, at the physiological level, so that it runs to help the child.
Future questions. Although interesting, the research is according to the same authors only preliminary and raises a series of questions to which future studies will be able to answer, as if to have experience with children influence in the physiological reactions and which precise sounds of the NLPs unleashes the answer – or if rather the cacophonic set of all the sounds to launch a sign of SOS so strong.
