Adults' preferences for side-of-hold as portrayed in paintings of the Madonna and Child

Abstract

Most women hold infants on their left side. They do the same when depicted in works of art. Does the latter accurately reflect the real-life bias, the artist's own aesthetic preference, or something else, such as the artist's handedness, sex, direction of attentional bias, or even the artist's own side-preference for holding infants? As a first step to finding out, we showed 272 young adults (85 men, 187 women) 20 pairs of paintings of the Madonna and Child, the original on one side, its mirror-reversal on the other, and asked which one they preferred. Along with assessing the effects of the variables already mentioned, we used equal numbers of paintings originally depicting left-holds and right-holds to control for the possible effects of differences between the paintings other than side-of-hold itself, such as in their colour scheme, background details, and the type of hold shown (e.g., cradle vs seated on lap). Each pair was presented twice, once with the original on the left, once on the right, for a total of 40 trials. Women and men alike more often preferred left-hold images, but the difference was significant only for women. Preferences were also stronger for original left-hold paintings than for the mirror-reversals of original right-hold paintings, suggesting that the originals differed in ways affecting preference beyond those we tried to control. Overall preference for left-hold images was enhanced when the images were on the viewer's left. As for the other variables, they were for the most part unrelated to preferences. The reasons for the preference thus remain unclear but it is evidently affected by multiple variables, with at least some clearly different from those affecting side-of-hold preferences of real mothers holding real infants.