Find out more about how kids’ voices and good old-fashioned stubbornness factor into new study results on the way adults see children and the decisions they make in response. This blog breaks down the double-edged sword of caregiver-child interactions, from emotional judgments to assessments of intelligence.
Dependency we learned in childhood that is affecting us as adults
Compared to other mammals, human children are incredibly helpless and dependent on their caregivers for a long time. It is through this extended period of dependence that resulted in the evolution of complicated signalling mechanisms by infants to attract and secure adult care.
Babies begin as simple as cries and facial expressions, and the methods of communication that babies use grow with age to include more advanced vocal cues, cognitive signals. Adults, the researchers found, were especially keyed into signs of immaturity in the voices and thoughts of children — cues that could inform them about what might be driving a child’s actions and thus help them tailor their responses.
Together these results shed light on an under-studied but important question: namely, how do caregivers balance children’s vocal vs. cognitive signals during early childhood? Broadcast: For example, the voice of a child looking young while being high up which has greater impact on caregivers. This dynamic sheds light on the complex nature of how children use communicative strategies in concert with caregiver responses.
Matching Cues vs. Contradictory Cues
To investigate this question, researchers from Florida Atlantic University and Universitat I Jaume in Spain created two overarching scenarios: one where a child’s vocal cues and cognitive cues were aligned (consistent condition) and another where they mismatched (inconsistent condition).
For example, in the uniform condition a child may have an infantile voice and still magical thinking (feel that what he thinks or does has unrealistic capacity transforming the world). An inconsistent condition would be a child with adult reasoning, yet still a tiny voice.
During these situations, the participants listened to recordings of children speaking, while researchers observed how the adults reacted to different verbal cues. What they were looking for was two-fold: the audio attributes of children and their level of logic.
The results show that when adults evaluate childrens success or distress, with those individuals for whom they are evaluating their well-being and/or dependence, adults pay significantly more attention to a childs voice. The story and/or the negative emotions behind the face are more important when assessing a child’s intelligence (magical thinking) or natural state of mind.
Children with an infantile voice and who communicated with magic fared worse when they made vocal and cognitive cues even, being perceived as increasingly helpless (for both boys and girls), while children using a mature voice and logical cognition were seen the most knowledgeable (less in need of help for boys only). By contrast, when the cues were in conflict, adults relied more on auditory over visual signals-boxing for strength and sadness/helpless for emotion.
Conclusion
The study reveals one of the myriad ways in which adults’ perception and responses to children are structured around both children’s vocal and cognitive cues. By understanding these dynamics, we gain critical information into caregiver-child interactions and perhaps more effective ways of helping both children as well as their caregivers. The relationship between vocal and cognitive signals is a key aspect of this topic which offers new insights into how human offspring are evolutionarily inclined to get care and attention from those who care for them.
