Date/Time

Location
Coykendall Science Building Auditorium, SUNY New Paltz Campus
600 Hawk Drive
New Paltz, New York

Details:

Whining is the Sincerest Form of Flattery: A Talk by Rosemarie Sokol Chang, Ph.D.

Children’s whining is a developmentally normal behavior that tops the list of complaints among the parents of toddlers. There is an untested assumption that parents unknowingly reinforce whining and that it is a form of noncompliance. That children whine discriminately – to people they love – indicates a larger role in attachment relationships than these assumptions imply. Recently research has shown that whines actually share important features with infant cries, and more surprisingly the soothing voice adults use with babies known as motherese. These three vocalizations have a similar acoustic structure, and all are better at distracting listeners and attracting attention than other sounds. While whines, cries, and motherese have some parallels to communication in other species, each stands out in humans for the breadth of people producing and responding to these sounds. Men, women and children all use motherese with infants. Men and women, regardless of parental status, are distracted by and attracted to whines and infant cries. These considerations have led us to consider whines, cries, and motherese as part of a suite of vocalizations that cater to an auditory sensitivity shared by humans, and reflect our evolved history of shared childcare.

This research has been highly publicized, and has even been summarized as a limerick on NPR. Here’s a link to media coverage regarding this work:

http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~changr/media.html

In addition to teaching for Psychology at New Paltz as an adjunct instructor, Dr. Chang holds the following positions:

President, NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society
Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology
Editor-in-Chief, EvoS Journal: The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium
Co-Founder, Feminist Evolutionary Psychology Society
Blogger, Evolution Matters, part of the EvoS Blogs

All are invited, especially parents! And please note this call for data from Dr. Chang:

Attention parents! Do you have a little whiner? Would you like to contribute to psychological research? Please bring an audio or video file of your child whining to this presentation and it might be used in a future research study. Only audio files will be used, but we can remove the video if you use a digital camera or the like. If you contribute a file, please bring it on a CD or DVD and mark it with your child’s age, and the statement “this audio file may be used in psychological research by Rose Chang” and your signature. If you can, please also include a short file of your child talking normally. Thank you!

The talk is free for all, and no advance registration is required. Just show up!