Adults can’t tell what a baby wants

Crying is an obvious sign something is up with your little baby, but beyond that, their feelings are tricky to interpret — except at playtime. Some researchers reckon that babies are simply practicing to learn to speak, while others think these noises have some underlying meaning.

“Babies probably aren’t aware of wanting to tell us something,” says Jitka Lindová, an evolutionary psychologist at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Instead, she says, infants are conveying their emotions. But can adults pick up on what those emotions are?

Lindová and her colleagues put 333 adults to the test. First they made 20- second recordings of five to 10- month- old babies while they were experiencing a range of emotions. For example, noises that meant a baby was experiencing pain were recorded while they received their standard vaccinations.

The team also collected recordings when infants were hungry, separated from a parent, reunited, just fed and while they were playing. Help me!

The adults could almost always tell whether a baby was distressed in some way. This makes sense — a baby’s survival may depend on an adult being able to tell whether a baby is unwell, in pain or in danger.

But beyond recognising a cry as positive or negative, Lindová’s volunteers were terrible at identifying specific emotions. Listeners frequently mistook pain for isolation or isolation with hunger, for example. There was one exception, however. On average, the adults were able to correctly recognise sounds associated with play 65 per cent of the time, a 24 per cent higher success rate than the other recordings.

Listeners frequently mistook pain for isolation or isolation with hunger