title: Mothers' tone of voice depends on the nature of infants' transgressions.
abstract: Emotional vocal signals are important ways of communicating norms to young infants. The second year is a period of increase in various forms of child transgressions, but also a period when infants have limited linguistic abilities. Two studies investigated the hypothesis that mothers respond with different vocal emotional tones to 3 types of child transgressions: moral (harming others), prudential (harming oneself), and pragmatic (creating inconvenience, e.g., by spilling) transgressions. We used a combination of naturalistic observation (Study 1) and experimental manipulation (Study 2) to record, code, and analyze maternal vocal responses to child transgressions. Both studies showed that mothers were more likely to use intense, angry vocalizations in response to moral transgressions, fearful vocalizations in response to prudential transgressions, comforting vocalizations in response to pragmatic and prudential transgressions, and (in Study 2) playful vocalizations in response to pragmatic transgressions. Study 1 showed that this differential use of vocal tone is used systematically in everyday life. Study 2 allowed us to standardize the context of the maternal intervention and perform additional acoustical analyses. A combination of principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis applied to pitch and intensity data provided quantitative measures of the differences in vocal responses. These differentiated vocal responses are likely contributors to children's acquisition of norms from early in life.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley.
authors.forename: Audun
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dahl
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley.
authors.forename: Briana R
authors.initials: BR
authors.lastname: Sherlock
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley.
authors.forename: Joseph J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Campos
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley.
authors.forename: Frédéric E
authors.initials: FE
authors.lastname: Theunissen
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000786:Anger; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D018730:Infant Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D008297:Male; D009014:Morals; D009034:Mother-Child Relations / Q000523:psychology*; D009035:Mothers / Q000523:psychology* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D014743:Videotape Recording; D014831:Voice