Crying is the primary signalling strategy available to the human newborn for eliciting parental care. Yet, we only have superficial understanding of the information carried by cries, and of how this information modulates parents’ interpretation and response to cries. Using modern tools of sound processing and playback experiments coupled with brain imaging and physiological monitoring, we are currently investigating both the information content of cries and the factors influencing the behavioural and the brain responses of adults to cries elicited by different levels of stress. We used dedicated sound analysis tools to compare the structure of cries of healthy babies recorded in controlled conditions differing by the degree of elicited stress (i.e. bath or vaccinations). We identified vocal ‘roughness’, a composite acoustic factor characterising the level of aperiodicity of the cries, that differs between different levels of discomfort or pain. On the receiver’s side, while adults are able to use acoustic features of cries to discriminate broad differences in distress levels, they fail to discriminate between different levels of pain. During this talk, we will also demonstrate the importance of familiarisation, emphasising that the ability to recognise newborns by their cries is independent of sex and parenthood status.