The motivational salience of infant faces is similar for men and women

Abstract

Infant facial features are thought to be powerful elicitors of caregiving behaviour. It has been widely assumed that men and women respond in different ways to those features, such as a large forehead and eyes and round protruding cheeks, colloquially described as 'cute'. We investigated experimentally potential differences using measures of both conscious appraisal ('liking') and behavioural responsivity ('wanting') to real world infant and adult faces in 71 non-parents. Overall, women gave significantly higher 'liking' ratings for infant faces (but not adult faces) compared to men. However, this difference was not seen in the 'wanting' task, where we measured the willingness of men and women to key-press to increase or decrease viewing duration of an infant face. Further analysis of sensitivity to cuteness, categorising infants by degree of infantile features, revealed that both men and women showed a graded significant increase in both positive attractiveness ratings and viewing times to the 'cutest' infants. We suggest that infant faces may have similar motivational salience to men and women, despite gender idiosyncrasies in their conscious appraisal.

Figure 1. Screenshots of the ‘liking’ task.

Participants were initially presented with a face image and a visual analogue scale (left) and were given 5 seconds to rate the image (right). The ‘wanting’ task was visually similar, except that the labels ‘very attractive’ and ‘very unattractive’ were absent, and the height of the white bar of the visual analogue scale decreased over time (the speed of this movement could be either increased or decreased by key-pressing).

Figure 2. ‘Liking’ and ‘wanting’ infant and adult faces.

Women’s mean ratings of the attractiveness of infant faces were significantly higher than men’s mean ratings. There was no difference in women’s and men’s attractiveness ratings for the adult faces (left). Men and women’s motivational salience (measured by mean viewing times) did not differ significantly for infant or adult faces (right). Error bars represent the mean +/− standard error.

Figure 3. The effect of infantile features on ‘liking’ and ‘wanting’.

Both men and women rated infant faces with more ‘infantile features’ as significantly more attractive than infant faces with less ‘infantile features’. Women’s overall ratings of infant attractiveness were significantly higher than men’s (left). There was a significant effect of the level of infantile features on mean viewing times, but this did not differ between men and women (right). Error bars represent mean +/− standard error. * p<0.05.