Mothers vs childless women tested on sensing infant distress signals — the result surprised researchers

Babies express their distress and emotions differently from adults, but not everyone can understand these signs. However, new research suggests that women can pick up on the subtle cues of distress in babies, even if they are not mothers. Also, they can sense signs of adult distress. Understanding infant distress signals, a vital trait for human survival, might be hardwired into us even if we do not know about it explicitly, per the study published in Science Direct. Previous studies have found that sad facial expressions or babies on the verge of crying can bring out the nurturing side in a person, per Scary Mommy.

The recent study aimed to understand if we can pick up the less-evident cues. These cues can play a crucial role in caregiving responses, according to researchers. The study used disengagement tasks and an eye-tracker procedure to see if subliminal exposure to an emotional baby or adult face affected mothers and non-mothers. It was conducted on 57 moms of infants and 57 child-free women. Regardless of whether a woman was a mom or not, they reacted to sad baby and adult faces more than they reacted to happy faces. The participants were told to focus on the center of the screen and were shown sad baby or adult faces for around 17 milliseconds.

After that, they were shown a color and then three different colored squares. They asked these women to spot the square of the color shown previously. The time that they took to redirect their gaze from the spot is known as saccadic latency and was used to measure how much their attention was captured by a distressed face. It was found that it was the hardest for the participants to redirect their gaze from a sad baby face. Moreover, there was barely any difference in how mothers and non-mothers reacted to the face.

"We were fascinated by the idea that certain emotional signals—like a baby’s cry or sad face—might be so evolutionarily important that our brain picks up on them even when we’re not consciously aware of them... Moreover, we wanted to understand if such sensitivity was specific to mothers," Elena Guida, a psychotherapist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Milano-Bicocca and one of the study's authors, told PsyPost. "What surprised us was the absence of a group effect between mothers and non-mothers." She added, "Both groups showed stronger unconscious processing of sad baby faces, while other expressions—such as happy or neutral baby faces, or sad adult faces—did not elicit the same response." 

Guida continued, "This indicates that the brain may prioritize processing cues of infant distress even without conscious awareness, highlighting the deep biological roots of caregiving and empathy." Guida remarked, "This points to a very specific and possibly hardwired mechanism that prioritizes infant distress cues, likely rooted in evolutionary pressures related to infant survival." The broad idea behind the study is to "understand the mechanisms underlying sensitive parenting." The psychotherapist explained, "By exploring both conscious and unconscious responses, we hope to shed light on the foundations of caregiving behavior and how they may vary across individuals and contexts." The study was mainly focused on women, so whether men can read subliminal cues is yet to be found.