PERCEPTUAL RESPONSES TO INFANT CRYING AFTER EEG BIOFEEDBACK-ASSISTED STRESS MANAGEMENT-TRAINING - IMPLICATIONS FOR PHYSICAL CHILD-ABUSE

The adult's perception of infant crying determines whether it is a sou rce of stress and may be an antecedent to physical child abuse. The st udy had clients listen to infant crying and used stress management tra ining to change their perceived arousal, anxiety, and evaluation of th e crying. Fifteen nonparental female clients were randomly assigned to three groups who either had pretraining without stress, pretraining w hile listening to infant crying, or listened to yoked infant crying wi thout pretraining. During the second stage all clients had stress mana gement training while listening to infant crying. The clients' perceiv ed anxiety and arousal elicited by crying were significantly diminishe d after stress management training and anxiety measures were strongly correlated with both perceived arousal and the clients' evaluation of infant crying. Although this is the first experiment applying biofeedb ack assisted stress management training to the perceptual responses an d physiological arousal associated with infant crying, these results w ith inexperienced clients have implications for the prevention and tre atment of parental stress and should encourage further research treati ng physical child abuse as a stress-related disorder.