Discrimination In Newborns

There have been many studies conducted on female voices and maternal voices involving testing preference, discrimination, and reinforcing qualities. However, there has been little emphasis and interest shown in male voices and paternal voices in these areas. The study conducted by Anthony DeCasper and Phyllis Prescott, is one of the few studies conducted that look into paternal and male voice perception for newborn infants. This study was divided into three experiments that were divided in testing preference, discrimination abilities, and reinforcing qualities seen in the voices. The research question they posed for experiment one was whether newborn infants had a preference between a paternal voice and a nonpaternal voice. Experiment two’s research question focused on voice discrimination between one male voice and another male voice. Finally, the third experiment’s research question assessed whether a male voice could elicit reinforcing behaviors for the newborn infants.
Experiment one participants included a total of six infants that completed the testing. Once again, the purpose of this experiment was to test whether newborn infants demonstrated a preference for their fathers’ voice …show more content…
Over the years, paternal roles in families have been neglected and have popularly been understood that the father is the “provider” of the family. Many research studies have focused most of their energy on maternal roles and affects in families. However, fathers or male caregivers can significantly impact the lives of their children and studies must be conducted to see the affects they have during the early development stages of their children. A few improvements to make to further the findings on this topic would be to include a larger sample size, have one experiment including only male infants to observe an gender differences,