| Abstract: | Adults' perceptions of infants' cries were evaluated by means of multidimensional scaling (MDS). Twenty-four nonparents (12 men and 12 women) and 20 parents (10 married couples) made judgments of the similarity of all possible pairs of 12 cries. Subjects also rated the 12 cries on 29 attributes, including perceived aversiveness, possible caretaking responses, affective responses, and semantic differential items. Nonmetric MDS was performed separately for mothers, fathers, nonparent women, and nonparent men. Four-dimensional configurations were interpretable for all groups except nonparent men, and the configurations exhibited strong overall similarity in spite of subtle differences between groups. The fathers' configuration was most similar to the mothers' configuration, and the nonparent women's configuration was most similar to the nonparent men's configuration. Contours of the fundamental frequency and the frequency with the greatest amplitude played a more important role in parents' perceptions of cries than in the nonparents' perceptions. Differences in the configurations probably reflected the parents' greater experience with infant cries and caregiving. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
