Soothing a crying baby can be frustrating and exhausting. Many new parents seek help from their families, doctors and social media in hopes that their crying baby will stop crying. On the other hand parents who don’t know how to seek for help result in experiencing extreme exhaustion, distress and frustration. Despite the many attempts parents have made to decrease their infants cry, parents can result in having harmful thoughts about their infant and in fact these harmful thoughts can result in child abuse and neglect (Glodowski, ; Thompson, 2017). In order to help parents soothe their crying infant, educators implemented educational programs that would help a parent overcome frustration and distress on themselves and their infant.
These educational programs are to provide parents with knowledge about how to care for an infant and basic knowledge about an infant. Parents are also given recommendations on how to deal with an infant whom has been crying for a long period of time, for example some educators recommend that the parent place the infant in a safe place, walk away or engage in an activity that distracts them for a short period of time, so in turn, the parent comes back more patient and calm (Glodowski, ; Thompson, 2017). The purpose of this study was to find evidence that supports that distracting activities could decrease aversiveness of an infant’s cry, with latency and duration of engagement as dependent variables. Although, the idea that distracting actives can distract a parent for a while, the study was not socially significant because participants that engaged in distracting activities had a small increase of latency.
Participants and Setting 37 undergraduate students participated and completed a screening in order to determine if participate could not tolerate an infant’s cry. Of those thirty-seven undergraduate students, six undergraduate students were eligible to participate in the study. Three female and three males all 18-21 of age, were not parents and all had babysitting experience with young infants. All students were from Western New England, where all sessions took place in a small research room located in the Psychology department. The research room was provided with a chair, desk and laptop.
All distracting activies were also provided with the extent of what condition was alternated for each session.Dependent Variable The dependent variable is latency, here the study measures how long can the participant can listen to the cry before the participant terminates the infant’s cry. Latency is measured by using a computer program that subtracts time from the time the participant clicked the “Start” button to the time participates click on the black button, the end button. Another dependent variable is the duration of engagement that participants engaged in, such as stress balls, puzzles, and an iPhone.
Observers recorded the duration of engagement by using a laptop to input data.Independent Variable(s)/ProceduresThe independent variable included two conditions, no activies provided and activies provided. Depending on each participant avability sessions with the two conditions were alternated. The first condition conducted was no condition and the second session alternated to activies and so forth. Each session began when the participant clicked the “Start” button and the researcher had left the room.
When participants clicked the “Start” button a recorded cry was produced, thus participants were given the ability to terminate the crying sound by clicking another black button on the computer; at any time they felt they could no longer withhold the sound. After the cry was terminated the recorded cry would loop to the same repeated sound for the next participant, in effort to avoid an escape from the session particioants were given thrity mintunes to one minture between sessions. For the no activies condition participants were told that, “A recorded cry will begin after you click the ‘Start’ button. Please tolerate the cry as long as possible. When you can longer tolerate the recorded cry, click the black button to trun it off.” After the participant had clicked the black button a message would appear on the screen saying, “Thank you for your participation.
The researcher will inform you when the session has ended.” The session that did provide acticitves had the exact introduction and message in the end, except the message in the end of the study had an additional statement that stated, “You may find it helpful to enage in some of these activies” (Glodowski, & Thompson, 2017). The researchers ensured that independent varuiable was impleneted correfctly by using alternating condions to demostarate experiment control.
Research Design Since each session used an alertnating design to conduct an experiment that the reserachers could control and have random outcomes. The frist coniton conducted was the no activies where participants were told to terminate the sound, when they could no longer yoletae the cry, here they had no distracting activies. The second condition conductd was the condition where activies were provide at the time the participant cliked the black button on the screen.
This study provided the reserachers with two data inputs, one data point was latency the time that participants clicked the black button, determined how much time they could tolerate the cry and the enagement data where the obersevrs would recored how long the participant enaged in one of the distracting activites provided. The research design followed a multiement design where the two conditions were alternated in rapidly with a thrity minute to a minute break before the nesxt participant arrived. Results were plotted on a graph to facilitate comparison. ResultsThe no activjies and actviitves conditions were compared between all six participants to determine if distracting activies did in fact make a difference then the condition without distracting ctivies.
It was conulded that three particpants did in fact tolerate the cry for a longer period of time, when distracting activies were provided, and level of engagement was high. The other threee remaining participants had a vaierty of enagement levels and tolerated the cry for similar durations in both conditions. Therefore, research shows that, “…activitves asscoited with high levels of engagement did not necessary decrease the aversiveness of the cry” (Glodowski, & Thompson, 2017).Analysis/CritiqueThis article
