Sound Analysis through Subjective Evaluation of Colic Crying: Second Report : Colic

Abstract

Colic crying is dearly one cause of child abuse. To study the psychological relationship between colic and child abuse, we employed subjective evaluation and objective sound analysis. To measure subjective evaluation we employed multi-dimensional scaling (MD) with seven grades (from −3 to +3). Items consisted of feelings, such as [unpleasant-pleasant], [hateful-dear] and [anger causing-desire to caress]. For objective testing we examined narrow band spectrogram (NBS), fundamental frequency (FF) and sound waves (SW) by Mac Speech Lab II. The interior of the subjective evaluation was observed using objective measurement. Colic cries were collected from two male babies each one-month old and played back for ten seconds by SoundScope/16 2. 7 (MacLab II) to evaluators. The average points of both cries were −25 for [unpleasant-pleasant], −4. 5 for [hateful-dear] and −4 for [anger causing-desire to caress]. The unpleasant feelings occurred in both when SW was at maximum at the start of crying, and during inharmonious configurations of NBS. Hateful and anger causing were felt from continuous unpleasant sounds. © 1999, The Japan Society of Logopedics and Phoniatrics. All rights reserved.