NCT05170178

Cracking the Code of Crying Babies: How Familiarity Changes the Interpretation of Cries

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 62 (actual)
• Sponsor: Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Saint Etienne · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 50 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Understanding babies' signals is essential to meet their needs. Recent works suggest that crying provides useful information, not only allowing parents to recognize their baby among others (static information), but also to distinguish between mild discomfort and pain cries (dynamic information). The perception of this information by adults involves a "parental" brain network including brain areas involved in empathy, attention, emotional regulation, motor as well as regions of the limbic system or associated with the reward network.

Detailed description

This network is involved when listening to cries of familiar babies, or pain cries. How do we become specialist of a baby's cries? To date, no functional imaging study has examined the specific brain activations when listening to the cries of a familiar baby in different situations, particularly painful ones.

Conditions

• Magnetic Resonance Imaging
• Neuronal Activity

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	inclusion and familiarization	* presentation of the study purpose and the protocol to the volunteer * clinical examination to check inclusion and exclusion criteria * Familiarization with the crying of one assigned baby, by listening to several bath cries from this baby
BEHAVIORAL	fMRI acquisition and closure	* Second phase of familiarization, listening again to bath cries of "their" assigned baby. These cries will be different from those listened during the first familiarization phase. * MRI acquisition: after acquisition of the anatomical images (5 min), the subjects will listen to 64 cries divided into 4 functional MRI sessions of 10 minutes each. The cries will be those of "their" baby or of unknown babies, evoked in a painful (vaccination) or a non-painful (bath) situation, presented in a pseudo-random order. Participants will be asked to assess whether they recognize "their" baby (yes/no) and whether they recognize a pain cry (yes/no). * debriefing * Protocol ending

Timeline

• Start date: 2022-06-30
• Primary completion: 2023-04-26
• Completion: 2023-05-12
• First posted: 2021-12-27
• Last updated: 2023-08-04

Locations

2 sites across 1 country: France