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.
Highlights
According to parental investment theory [1], the relative proportion of parental investment varies between males and females
The current study aimed to explore the following two main research questions: a) To what extent do gender and gender role orientation among childless adults influence their infant preferences? b) Are these differences or effects influenced by infant facial expressions?
We found that femininity significantly interacted with sex in all motivational values towards infants, which indicates that the effect of femininity on reactions to infant faces was more significant for men than for women
Summary
According to parental investment theory [1], the relative proportion of parental investment varies between males and females. Female investment in parenting is heavier than male investment, albeit with some exceptions [2, 3]. Men assume lower levels of minimum parental investment than women do [4]. Women are forced to bear the cost of fertilization, gestation and even lactation. The minimum physiological obligation of men is merely the contribution of sperm, which is considerably less than the obligations of women. Lactation could last several years for ancestral women, which made it more difficult for women than for men to reproduce and invest in additional offspring [5]. Male parental investment is presumably more malleable than female investment
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