Baby don’t cry: Unconscious sensitivity to sad baby faces

Abstract

Infant cues are known to play a crucial role in eliciting caregiving responses, making them essential for survival and development of offspring. Yet, it is still unknown whether infant faces may attract adults’ attention when presented under the level of consciousness. Using a disengagement task and an eye-tracker procedure, this study investigated whether the subliminal exposure to emotional baby vs adult faces affects mothers’ (N = 57) and non-mothers’ (N = 57) attention disengagement. Independently from their parental status, women had longer saccadic latencies following subliminal sad baby faces, compared to happy baby faces and sad adult faces. These findings indicate that infants’ sad facial expressions below the threshold of conscious perception can induce an attentional bias, thus representing a highly salient social signal for the human species.