Associate Professor Parsons stated that the brain is geared to respond to a baby’s cry faster than some other sounds in the environment.
Adults’ brains respond to baby cries much faster than adult cries, a leading researcher has stated. Maynooth University alum Christine Parsons an Associate Prof. at Aarhus University, Denmark, has stated that listening to baby cries compared with adult cries was associated with activity in a reward region of the brain, the orbitofrontal cortex, occurring at around 130 milliseconds.
In further work, Parsons and her fellow researchers found that the periaqueductal gray - an area deep in the mid-brain, linked to survival or 'do-or-die' behaviours - shows specific activity within 49 milliseconds of a recorded infant sound being played.
This activity may support us in responding rapidly to a baby when we need to.
The investigators also detected rapid firing in brain regions that check a stimulus for its emotional salience and in areas that control movement.
Associate Professor Parsons, along with research colleagues from Aarhus University in Denmark, Dr Katherine Young from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Morten L. Kringelbach of Oxford University and others have tracked reactions to the sound of a baby cry in both brain scans of healthy volunteers and direct electrode measurements in adult patients who were undergoing neurosurgery.
"Our work has used a range of brain imaging methods to understand human behaviour, motivation and emotion processes. These methods can give us fundamental information about how the brain guides adaptive behaviour," Associate Professor Parsons stated.
"This research is fundamental to our understanding of the parental brain – it shows how the brain is geared to respond to a baby’s cry.
"A baby’s cry has built-in features that make it difficult to ignore.
"We think the way that adults respond to these important signals from babies can have long-term effects on development."
