Adults’ responsiveness to children’s facial expressions

Abstract

We investigated the effect of young children’s (hereafter children’s) facial expressions on adult responsiveness. In Study 1, 131 undergraduate students from a midsized university in the midwestern United States rated children’s images and videos with smiling, crying, or neutral expressions on cuteness, likelihood to adopt, and participants’ experienced distress. Looking times at images and videos along with perception of cuteness, likelihood to adopt, and experienced distress using 10-point Likert scales were measured. Videos of smiling children were rated as cuter and more likely to be adopted and were viewed for longer times compared with videos of crying children, which evoked more distress. In Study 2, we recorded responses from 101 of the same participants in an online survey measuring gender role identity, empathy, and perspective taking. Higher levels of femininity (as measured by Bem’s Sex Role Inventory) predicted higher “likely to adopt” ratings for crying images. These findings indicate that adult perception of children and motivation to nurture are affected by both children’s facial expressions and adult characteristics and build on existing literature to demonstrate that children may use expressions to manipulate the motivations of even non-kin adults to direct attention toward and perhaps nurture young children.