The Pleasure Instinct: Why We Crave Adventure, Chocolate, Pheromones, and Music Read Online Free PDF Page A

and emotional expressions of nearby adults, an effort in identification and novelty-seeking that promotes further stimulation from parents.“The development of linguistic communication is a story about the preoccupation among the human young with things that move—faces that wrinkle, eyes that dance, voices that undulate, and hands that wiggle through the air,” wrote child psychologist John Locke.“Parents obviously understand this and, correctly believing that more is better, exaggerate their facial and vocal movements when addressing their young.And to good developmental effect, for the cues to phrase boundaries are prosodic, and the cues to vocal turn taking include variations in pitch and gaze.”
    Why does the infant pay attention to speech? It is surely not to learn the rules of syntax, widen its semantic base, or because it thinks language is an important mode of communication. No, the process of gazing into the eyes of those around it and eliciting motherese stems rather from the child’s basic, biological imperative to interact and connect emotionally with the people who nurture it. Infants orient toward the human voice, especially Mama’s, and lock on to her face, studying it with deep concentration. Why should they do this? What are the biological and psychological reasons for such persistent behaviors? Surely they are adaptive in that they draw the caretaker closer to the infant, allowing it to identify those who are most likely to offer affection and nurturance.
    Babies continue to learn the sounds of their mother tongue during the first year of life, all the while maintaining their innate fondness for prosody and the other features of motherese. We will see in later chapters that the infant’s pleasure instinct for prosody has surprisingly long-term consequences, particularly for the evolution of aesthetic and musical preferences in the adult. For instance, synthesized sounds that have extreme pitch variations reminiscent of motherese evoke a feeling of pleasure in adults, who often associate them with happiness, interest, and surprise. Sounds that have a falling-pitch contour (high frequency decreasing to lower frequencies) elicit feelings of calm and relaxation. Imagine a parent who soothes a crying child with “Aahh,” or the meditation practitioner chanting “Ohmm.”Vocalizations that have a rising pitch contour have a very different effect; they tend to excite and grab our attention—“Hey!” From cross-cultural studies, it is clear that both natural and synthetic exaggerations in pitch have a universal appeal, whether they are embedded in music, speech, or song, presumably as a result of the same underlying biological mechanisms that have evolved to promote social attachment through our attraction to prosody.
    An infant’s face also conveys emotional information directly to the caregiver, and they are incredibly talented mimics even at birth. Developmental psychologist Andrew Meltzoff was the first to demonstrate that newborns as young as forty-five minutes old are able to reproduce facial gestures corresponding to primary emotional conditions such as disgust (tongue protrusion), surprise (mouth opening), and sadness (lip protrusion)—even before they have seen their own face! Thus from the very beginning of life, human infants are busy employing and refining their methods of communication, and the primary topic of discourse is that of emotions.
    While it is true that infants enter a linguistic babbling stage, a visual analog of this behavior is seen in their tendency to produce varied facial postures shortly after birth—another sort of babbling. Through trial and error, they learn quickly which expressions evoke an emotional response in adult observers. Adults, of course, learn the same lesson, and generate a number of facial postures and behaviors, eventually stumbling on the ones that elicit facial expressions in the infant that correspond to positive emotions. Emotions, then, are the