Don't you know why the baby cries? Look at her eyes

One of the reasons that can worry parents the most is the crying of the baby, a puzzle, especially when we talk about newborns. A recent study ensures that Looking at the baby's face, especially in his eyes, we can know the reason for crying.

Baby's crying may be due to multiple causes, but according to researchers at the University of Murcia and the National University of Distance Education (UNED) babies cry out of anger or fear when they have their eyes open and because of pain when they are kept closed.

They have reached these conclusions after studying the crying of 20 babies between three and 18 months, looking at this way of communicating the baby. Although the main reasons are hunger, pain, anger or fear, adults do not easily recognize what emotion is causing the baby's tears.

The study, entitled "Infant Crying: Pattern of Weeping, Recognition of Emotion and Affective Reactions in Observers," was published in the journal in November in the journal. The Spanish Journal of Psychology.

It shows that the main differences are presented in eye activity and crying dynamics. In the latter, experts have shown that both the gestures and the intensity of crying are gradually increasing if it is due to anger, while they appear at their maximum intensity from the first moment in the case of pain and fear.

The face of a crying baby

We all have in mind the face of a crying baby, but another thing is to enumerate and systematize the changes that occur in the face during that process.

In general, when a baby cries the muscular activity of his face is characterized by a great tension in the forehead, eyebrows or lips, and the opening of the mouth and the elevation of the cheeks occurs.

In the eyes would be the biggest difference according to the cause of the crying: when babies are angry, most keep their eyes half closed, with a look apparently without direction or, on the contrary, fixed and prominent.

I am sad to imagine how they would have had to reach these conclusions, but in the case of fear, eyes remain open almost all the time. Sometimes babies have a scrutinizing look, move their heads back, and crying appears explosively, after a gradual increase in tension.

Finally, for pain it was found that it manifests with eyes closed almost all the time, and in the few moments in which they are open, they are minimally, with distant eyes. The crying, which begins suddenly just after the pain occurs, from the beginning reaches its maximum intensity.

On the other hand, researchers have found that parents do not usually identify clearly what emotion is the one that induces crying, especially when it comes to anger and fear.

In any case, and given the obvious margin of error that, in my opinion, these data have, and especially that sometimes we are not to look at how the child's eyes are, even if we don't know what is the reason for the baby crying Try to calm him down, since in no case should the baby's cry be ignored.