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 source of stress and may be an antecedent to physical child abuse. The study had clients listen to infant crying and used stress management training to change their perceived arousal, anxiety, and evaluation of the crying. Fifteen nonparental female clients were randomly assigned to three groups who either had pretraining without stress, pretraining while listening to infant crying, or listened to yoked infant crying without pretraining. During the second stage all clients had stress management training while listening to infant crying. The clients' perceived anxiety and arousal elicited by crying were significantly diminished 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 biofeedback assisted stress management training to the perceptual responses and physiological arousal associated with infant crying, these results with inexperienced clients have implications for the prevention and treatment of parental stress and should encourage further research treating physical child abuse as a stress-related disorder.