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.

The reward value of infant facial cuteness tracks within-subject changes in women's salivary testosterone

“…This pattern of results is consistent with the proposal (Parsons et al, 2011;Yamamoto et al, 2009) that infant facial cuteness can have dissociable effects on measures of wanting (i.e., reward) and liking (i.e., ratings).…”

“…Studies using behavioral measures of the reward value of faces, such as key-press tasks (Aharon et al, 2001), also suggest that viewing cute infant faces is rewarding; people are willing to expend more effort to view high-cuteness versions of infant face images than they are to view low-cuteness versions (Hahn et al, 2013). This pattern of results has also been observed using unmanipulated infant faces (Parsons et al, 2011;Sprengelmeyer et al, 2013).…”

“…The key-press task that we used to measure the reward value of infant facial cuteness has also been used to assess the reward value of infant faces in several previous studies (Charles et al, 2013;Hahn et al, 2013;Parsons et al, 2011Parsons et al, , 2013Yamamoto et al, 2009). In this key-press task, all 20 infant face images (i.e., the high-cuteness and low-cuteness versions of the 10 infant faces) were presented in a fully randomized order.…”

Menstrual cycle phase affects discrimination of infant cuteness

“…Cuter babies were also more likely chosen in the care-taking task. This is in line with findings of Glocker et al (2009a), who reported that cuteness induces caretaking motivation (see also Lorenz, 1943) and with Hahn et al (2013), who found that men and women were more motivated to work to see cute babies (but see Parsons et al, 2011;Sprengelmeyer et al, 2013 for conflicting evidence and a lack of gender difference). The present findings suggest that women might be even more motivated to care for a cute baby around ovulation.…”

Too Sweet To Eat: Exploring the Effects of Cuteness on Meat Consumption

“…The authors concluded that female reproductive hormones play a crucial role in cuteness perception. Some research has replicated sex differences regarding cuteness perception, but not its motivational components (i.e., caretaking; Parsons, Young, Kumari, Stein, & Kringelbach, 2011).…”