Word: elman
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...Women] pressed the key 2.5 times as much to get rid of those pictures," Elman says. "That's highly statistically significant...
...offspring most likely to yield the highest genetic payoff; healthy, beautiful offspring are the best bet of all. Perhaps women, who still must do the lion's share of childcare, are naturally more attuned to this trade-off than men are. "In general, men tend to be aesthetically oriented," Elman says, "so they'll press a lot to hold the beautiful babies on the screen. Women are more consequence-oriented." (Read "Parenting Advice: What Moms Should Learn from Dads...
There are some potential holes in Elman's work, all of which he acknowledges. For one thing, it's possible women avoid the unattractive faces not because they're less sensitive to them but because they're more sensitive, simply finding the hardships endured by unhealthy babies too difficult to contemplate. Such highly tuned empathy can ultimately make them better caregivers, even if a four-second exposure to the idea is painful. "Everyone will try to get away from a stimulus that feels like a punishment and hold on to one that feels like a reward," Elman says...
...anonymous child with physical abnormalities is likely to be radically different from the way they would react if that child were their own - something that is readily evident from all the disabled children on whom parents lavish love. Still, the fact that both parents and nonparents in Elman's study reacted the same way to the pictures suggests that their responses are deeply ingrained and that they may be hard to mitigate simply by having children of their...
...faces off the screen, but neither did they linger over them the way they did the attractive faces. In both cases, this suggests bias, and when the rubber hits the road of real childcare, parents of either sex may end up having similar instincts. More clarity should come when Elman conducts the next phase of his work: running the same experiment but hooking the subjects up to brain scans throughout it. This will make it far easier to see just which areas of the brain are activated when viewing the pictures and, by implication, which feelings and motivations are being...