Dataset Information

The role of sex and femininity in preferences for unfamiliar infants among Chinese adults.

ABSTRACT: Guided by parental investment theory and social role theory, this study aimed to understand current contradictory results regarding sex differences in response to infant faces by considering the effect of gender role orientation. We recruited 300 adults in China and asked them to complete an Interest in Infants questionnaire and a Bem Sex Role Inventory and then administered a behavioral assessment that used unfamiliar infant faces with varying expressions (laughing, neutral, and crying) as stimuli to gauge three components of motivation towards infants (i.e., liking, representational responding, and evoked responding). The results demonstrated that sex differences emerged only in self-reported interest in infants, but no difference was found between the sexes in terms of their hedonic reactions to infant faces. Furthermore, femininity was found to correlate with preferences for infants in both verbal and visual tests, but significant interactive effects of feminine traits and sex were found only in the behavioral test. The findings indicated that men's responses to infants were influenced more by their feminine traits than were women's responses, potentially explaining the greater extent to which paternal (vs. maternal) investment is facultative.

SUBMITTER: Ding F

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7660579 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The role of sex and femininity in preferences for unfamiliar infants among Chinese adults.

Ding Fangyuan F Cheng Gang G Jia Yuncheng Y Zhang Wen W Lin Nan N Zhang Dajun D Mo Wenjing W

PloS one 20201112 11

Guided by parental investment theory and social role theory, this study aimed to understand current contradictory results regarding sex differences in response to infant faces by considering the effect of gender role orientation. We recruited 300 adults in China and asked them to complete an Interest in Infants questionnaire and a Bem Sex Role Inventory and then administered a behavioral assessment that used unfamiliar infant faces with varying expressions (laughing, neutral, and crying) as stim ...[more]

PMID: 33180806

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Project description:BackgroundInfants and children travel using passports that are typically valid for five years (e.g. Canada, United Kingdom, United States and Australia). These individuals may also need to be identified using images taken from videos and other sources in forensic situations including child exploitation cases. However, few researchers have examined how useful these images are as a means of identification.MethodsWe investigated the effectiveness of photo identification for infants and children using a face matching task, where participants were presented with two images simultaneously and asked whether the images depicted the same child or two different children. In Experiment 1, both images showed an infant (<1 year old), whereas in Experiment 2, one image again showed an infant but the second image of the child was taken at 4-5 years of age. In Experiments 3a and 3b, we asked participants to complete shortened versions of both these tasks (selecting the most difficult trials) as well as the short version Glasgow face matching test. Finally, in Experiment 4, we investigated whether information regarding the sex of the infants and children could be accurately perceived from the images.ResultsIn Experiment 1, we found low levels of performance (72% accuracy) for matching two infant photos. For Experiment 2, performance was lower still (64% accuracy) when infant and child images were presented, given the significant changes in appearance that occur over the first five years of life. In Experiments 3a and 3b, when participants completed both these tasks, as well as a measure of adult face matching ability, we found lowest performance for the two infant tasks, along with mixed evidence of within-person correlations in sensitivities across all three tasks. The use of only same-sex pairings on mismatch trials, in comparison with random pairings, had little effect on performance measures. In Experiment 4, accuracy when judging the sex of infants was at chance levels for one image set and above chance (although still low) for the other set. As expected, participants were able to judge the sex of children (aged 4-5) from their faces.DiscussionIdentity matching with infant and child images resulted in low levels of performance, which were significantly worse than for an adult face matching task. Taken together, the results of the experiments presented here provide evidence that child facial photographs are ineffective for use in real-world identification.

Dataset Information

The role of sex and femininity in preferences for unfamiliar infants among Chinese adults.

Publications

The role of sex and femininity in preferences for unfamiliar infants among Chinese adults.

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