Impact of babyface schema on time perception: Insights from neutral and crying facial expressions

Abstract

Facial expressions in infants have been noted to create a spatial attention bias when compared with adult faces. Yet, there is limited understanding of how adults perceive the timing of infant facial expressions. To investigate this, we used both infant and adult facial expressions in a temporal bisection task. In Experiment 1, we compared duration judgments of neutral infant and adult faces. The results revealed that participants felt that neutral infant faces lasted for a shorter time than neutral adult faces, independent of participant sex. Experiment 2 employed sad (crying) facial expressions. Here, the female participants perceived that the infants' faces were displayed for a longer duration than the adults' faces, whereas this distinction was not evident among the male participants. These findings highlight the influence of the babyface schema on time perception, nuanced by emotional context and sex-based individual variances.

Key words： attention; duration perception; embodiment; infant facial expression; sex difference

References

1 Angrilli, A., Cherubini, P., Pavese, A., & Manfredini, S. (1997). The influence of affective factors on time perception. Perception & Psychophysics, 59(6), 972–982.

2 Arantes, J., Pinho, M., Wearden, J., & Albuquerque, P. B. (2021). “Time slows down whenever you are around” for women but not for men. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 641729.

3 Bornstein, M. H., Putnick, D. L., Rigo, P., Swain, J. E., Suwalsky, J. T. D., Su, X., Du, X., Zhang, K., Cote, L. R., De Pisapia, N., & Venuti, P. (2017). Neurobiology of culturally common maternal responses to infant cry. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(45), E9465–E9473.

4 Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Attachment (Vol. 1). Basic Books.

5 Bradley, M. M., & Lang, P. J. (1994). Measuring emotion: The self-assessment manikin and the semantic differential. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 25(1), 49–59.

6 Brainard, D. H. (1997). The psychophysics toolbox. Spatial Vision, 10(4), 433–436.

7 Brosch, T., Sander, D., & Scherer, K. R. (2007). That baby caught my eye… Attention capture by infant faces. Emotion, 7(3), 685–689.

8 Burle, B., & Casini, L. (2001). Dissociation between activation and attention effects in time estimation: Implications for internal clock models. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(1), 195–205.

9 Cárdenas, R. A., Harris, L. J., & Becker, M. W. (2013). Sex differences in visual attention toward infant faces. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34(4), 280–287.

10 Caria, A., de Falco, S., Venuti, P., Lee, S., Esposito, G., Rigo, P., Birbauer, N., & Bornstein, M. H. (2012). Species-specific response to human infant faces in the premotor cortex. NeuroImage, 60(2), 884–893.

11 Clark, A. (1999). An embodied cognitive science? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3(9), 345–351.

12 Colasante, T., Mossad, S. I., Dudek, J., & Haley, D. W. (2017). The special status of sad infant faces: Age and valence differences in adults' cortical face processing. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(4), 586–595.

13 Craig, A. D. (2009). Emotional moments across time: A possible neural basis for time perception in the anterior insula. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 364(1525), 1933–1942.

14 Ding, F., Zhang, D., & Cheng, G. (2016). The effect of secure attachment state and infant facial expressions on childless adults' parental motivation. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1237.

15 Droit-Volet, S. (2019). The temporal dynamic of emotional effect on judgments of durations. In A. Valtteri, B. Adrian, E. P. Sean, & V. Argiro (Eds.), The illusions of time: Philosophical and psychological essays on timing and time perception (Vol. 8, e8565). Palgrave Macmillan.

16 Droit-Volet, S., & Berthon, M. (2017). Emotion and implicit timing: The arousal effect. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 176.

17 Droit-Volet, S., Brunot, S., & Niedenthal, P. M. (2004). Perception of the duration of emotional events. Cognition and Emotion, 18(6), 849–858.

18 Droit-Volet, S., & Dambrun, M. (2019). Awareness of the passage of time and self-consciousness: What do meditators report? PsyCh Journal, 8(1), 51–65.

19 Droit-Volet, S., Fayolle, S., Lamotte, M., & Gil, S. (2013). Time, emotion and the embodiment of timing. Timing & Time Perception, 1(1), 99–126.

20 Droit-Volet, S., & Gil, S. (2009). The time-emotion paradox. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 364(1525), 1943–1953.

21 Droit-Volet, S., & Meck, W. H. (2007). How emotions colour our perception of time. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(12), 504–513.

22 Droit-Volet, S., Mermillod, M., Cocenas-Silva, R., & Gil, S. (2010). The effect of expectancy of a threatening event on time perception in human adults. Emotion, 10(6), 908–914.

23 Endendijk, J., Smit, A., van Baar, A., & Bos, P. (2020). What a cute baby! Preliminary evidence from a fMRI study for the association between mothers' neural responses to infant faces and activation of the parental care system. Neuropsychologia, 143, 107493.

24 Engel, A. K., Maye, A., Kurthen, M., & Konig, P. (2013). Where's the action? The pragmatic turn in cognitive science. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17(5), 202–209.

25 Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A.-G., & Buchner, A. (2007). G*power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39(2), 175–191.

26 Fayolle, S., Gil, S., & Droit-Volet, S. (2015). Fear and time: Fear speeds up the internal clock. Behavioural Processes, 120, 135–140.

27 Franklin, P., Volk, A. A., & Wong, I. (2018). Are newborns' faces less appealing? Evolution and Human Behavior, 39(3), 269–276.

28 Gibbon, J. (1977). Scalar expectancy theory and Weber's law in animal timing. Psychological Review, 84(3), 279–325.

29 Gibbon, J., & Church, R. M. (1990). Representation of time. Cognition, 37(1–2), 23–54.

30 Gibbon, J., Church, R. M., & Meck, W. H. (1984). Scalar timing in memory. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 423(1), 52–77.

31 Gil, S., & Droit-Volet, S. (2011). How do emotional facial expressions influence our perception of time? In S. Masmoudi, D. Y. Dai, & A. Naceur (Eds.), Attention, representation, and human performance: Integration of cognition, emotion, and motivation (pp. 61–74). Psychology Press.

32 Gil, S., & Droit-Volet, S. (2012). Emotional time distortions: The fundamental role of arousal. Cognition & Emotion, 26(5), 847–862.

33 Glicksohn, J., & Hadad, Y. (2012). Sex differences in time production revisited. Journal of Individual Differences, 33, 35–42.

34 Glocker, M. L., Langleben, D. D., Ruparel, K., Loughead, J. W., Valdez, J. N., Griffin, M. D., Sachser, N., & Gur, R. C. (2009). Baby schema modulates the brain reward system in nulliparous women. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(22), 9115–9119.

35 Grommet, E. K., Droit-Volet, S., Gil, S., Hemmes, N. S., Baker, A. H., & Brown, B. L. (2011). Time estimation of fear cues in human observers. Behavioural Processes, 86(1), 88–93.

36 Hagura, N., Kanai, R., Orgs, G., & Haggard, P. (2012). Ready steady slow: Action preparation slows the subjective passage of time. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279(1746), 4399–4406.

37 Jia, L., Shao, B., Wang, X., & Shi, Z. (2021). Phrase depicting immoral behavior dilates its subjective time judgment. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 784752.

38 Jia, L., Shi, Z., Zang, X., & Müller, H. J. (2015). Watching a real moving object expands tactile duration: The role of task-irrelevant action context for subjective time. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 77(8), 2768–2780.

39 Jia, Y., Ding, F., Cheng, G., Chen, J., Zhang, W., Lin, N., & Zhang, D. (2021). Adults' responses to infant faces: Neutral infant facial expressions elicit the strongest baby schema effect. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(5), 853–871.

40 Jia, Y., Ding, F., Cheng, G., Liu, Y., Yu, W., Zou, Y., & Zhang, D. (2022). Infants' neutral facial expressions elicit the strongest initial attentional bias in adults: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence. Psychophysiology, 59(1), e13944.

41 Jia, Y., Ding, F., Cheng, G., Zhang, W., Lin, N., & Zhang, D. (2019). Initial establishment of the same face with multi-expressions' image database for infants and adults. Chinese Mental Health Journal, 33, 918–924.

42 Long, N., Yu, W., Wang, Y., Gong, X., Zhang, W., & Chen, J. (2021). Do infant faces maintain the attention of adults with high avoidant attachment? Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 631751.

43 Lorenz, K. (1943). The innate forms of potential experience. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 5(2), 235–409.

44 Lucion, M. K., Oliveira, V., Bizarro, L., Bischoff, A. R., Silveira, P. P., & Kauer-Sant'Anna, M. (2017). Attentional bias toward infant faces – Review of the adaptive and clinical relevance. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 114, 1–8.

45 Lui, M. A., Penney, T. B., & Schirmer, A. (2011). Emotion effects on timing: Attention versus pacemaker accounts. PLoS One, 6(7), e21829.

46 Luo, L., Ma, X., Zheng, X., Zhao, W., Xu, L., Becker, B., & Kendrick, K. (2015). Neural systems and hormones mediating attraction to infant and child faces. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 970.

47 Maricq, A. V., Roberts, S., & Church, R. M. (1981). Methamphetamine and time estimation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 7(1), 18–30.

48 Messina, I., Cattaneo, L., Venuti, P., de Pisapia, N., Serra, M., Esposito, G., Rigo, P., Farneti, A., & Bornstein, M. (2016). Sex-specific automatic responses to infant cries: TMS reveals greater excitability in females than males in motor evoked potentials. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1909.

49 Naghibi, N., Jahangiri, N., Khosrowabadi, R., Eickhoff, C. R., Eickhoff, S. B., Jennifer, T. C., & Tahmasian, M. (2024). Embodying time in the brain: A multi-dimensional neuroimaging meta-analysis of 95 duration processing studies. Neuropsychology Review, 34, 277–298.

50 Niedenthal, P. M. (2007). Embodying emotion. Science, 316(5827), 1002–1005.

51 Ogden, R. S. (2013). The effect of facial attractiveness on temporal perception. Cognition & Emotion, 27(7), 1292–1304.

52 Parsons, C. E., Young, K. S., Kumari, N., Stein, A., & Kringelbach, M. (2011). The motivational salience of infant faces is similar for men and women. PLoS One, 6(5), e20632.

53 Penton-Voak, I. S., Edwards, H., Percival, A., & Wearden, J. H. (1996). Speeding up an internal clock in humans? Effects of click trains on subjective duration. Journal of Experimental Psychology-Animal Behavior Processes, 22(3), 307–320.

54 Pollatos, O., Laubrock, J., & Wittmann, M. (2014). Interoceptive focus shapes the experience of time. PLoS One, 9(1), e86934.

55 Posner, M. I., Inhoff, A. W., Friedrich, F. J., & Cohen, A. (1987). Isolating attentional systems: A cognitive-anatomical analysis. Psychobiology, 15(2), 107–121.

56 Raghunath, B. L., Sng, K. H. L., Chen, S. H. A., Vijayaragavan, V., Gulyás, B., Setoh, P., & Esposito, G. (2022). Stronger brain activation for own baby but similar activation toward babies of own and different ethnicities in parents living in a multicultural environment. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 10988.

57 Rhodes, G. (2006). The evolutionary psychology of facial beauty. Annual Review of Psychology, 57(1), 199–226.

58 Sakaki, M., Niki, K., & Mather, M. (2012). Beyond arousal and valence: The importance of the biological versus social relevance of emotional stimuli. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 12(1), 115–139.

59 Shi, Z., Jia, L., & Müller, H. J. (2012). Modulation of tactile duration judgments by emotional pictures. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 6, 24.

60 Soltis, J. (2004). The signal functions of early infant crying. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 27(4), 443–458.

61 Theeuwes, J. (2010). Top-down and bottom-up control of visual selection. Acta Psychologica, 135(2), 77–99.

62 Thomas, E. C., & Weaver, W. B. (1975). Cognitive processing and time perception. Perception & Psychophysics, 17(4), 363–367.

63 Tian, Y., Li, L., Yin, H., & Huang, X. (2019). Gender differences in the effect of facial attractiveness on perception of time. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1292.

64 Vingerhoets, A. J. J. M., & Bylsma, L. M. (2016). The riddle of human emotional crying: A challenge for emotion researchers. Emotion Review, 8(3), 207–217.

65 Wearden, J. H., Edwards, H., Fakhri, M., & Percival, A. (1998). Why “sounds are judged longer than lights”: Application of a model of the internal clock in humans. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. B, Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 51(2), 97–120.

66 Wittmann, M. (2013). The inner sense of time: How the brain creates a representation of duration. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 14(3), 217–223.

67 Wittmann, M. (2014). Embodied time: The experience of time, the body, and the self. In V. Arstila & D. Lloyd (Eds.), Subjective time: The philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of temporality (pp. 507–523). MIT Press.

68 Wittmann, M., & van Wassenhove, V. (2009). The experience of time: Neural mechanisms and the interplay of emotion, cognition and embodiment. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1525), 1809–1813.

69 Wittmann, M., van Wassenhove, V., Craig, A. D., & Paulus, M. P. (2010). The neural substrates of subjective time dilation. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 4, 2.

70 Young, K. S., Parsons, C. E., Jegindoe Elmholdt, E.-M., Woolrich, M. W., Van Hartevelt, T. J., Stevner, A. B. A., Stein, A., & Kringelbach, M. L. (2016). Evidence for a caregiving instinct: Rapid differentiation of infant from adult vocalizations using magnetoencephalography. Cerebral Cortex, 26(3), 1309–1321.

71 Zakay, D., & Block, R. A. (1995). An attentional gate model of prospective time estimation. In M. Richelle, V. D. Keyser, G. d'Ydewalle, & A. Vandierendonck (Eds.), Time and the dynamic control of behavior (pp. 167–178). Universite Liège.

72 Zakay, D., & Block, R. A. (1996). The role of attention in time estimation processes. In M. A. Pastor & J. Artieda (Eds.), Time, internal clocks and movement (pp. 143–164). North-Holland.

73 Zakay, D., & Block, R. A. (1997). Temporal cognition. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 6(1), 12–16.

74 Zhang, K., Du, X., Liu, X., Su, W., Sun, Z., Wang, M., & Du, X. (2022). Gender differences in brain response to infant emotional faces. BMC Neuroscience, 23(1), 79.

75 Zhou, S., Li, L., Wang, F., & Tian, Y. (2021). How facial attractiveness affects time perception: Increased arousal results in temporal dilation of attractive faces. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 784099.