The overall objective of the proposed research is to further characterize the role of prenatal experience in influencing the auditory responsiveness of the newborn and postnatal behavior. Specifically, this project aims to examine the influence of prenatal experience on differential responding to vocal expressions of emotion in newborns, and whether such responding is influenced by atypical maternal emotional conditions during the prenatal period (i.e., maternal depression). The first experiment will utilize a contingent behavior paradigm to examine newborn listening preferences for different vocal expressions of emotion (i.e., happy, sad, angry and neutral). It is expected that the infants will demonstrate a listening preference for happy vocal expressions over all other vocal stimuli. The second set of experiments will compare the responses of infants of depressed and non-depressed mothers to the presentation of the different vocal expressions using each of the following approaches: observations of differential behavioral reactivity, differential physiological reactivity using measurements of changes in heart rate, and the contingent behavior paradigm. Because infants of depressed mothers are likely to be exposed to less frequent and less distinctive maternal vocal expressions of emotion prenatally, it is expected that these infants will be less responsive to emotional speech patterns after birth and, more particularly, that they will exhibit less differential responding to different emotional speech patterns.
