Exploring the Contribution of Gender Roles on Adults' EEG Responses to Infant Faces

Prior research has shown that women tend to be more responsive to infant cues than men. However, the influence of different aspects of social gender, like gender norms associated with femininity and masculinity, on individual responses to infant cues, has received no attention to date. This study is the first to investigate how gender roles, conceptualized as continuous traits of femininity and masculinity, are associated with electrophysiological responses to facial stimuli from infants and adults. Electroencephalography was used to record the neural activity of 60 nonparent adults (50% women) while they completed an emotion recognition task displaying infant and adult faces expressing happy, neutral, or sad emotions. Participants also completed an Italian translation of the Bem Sex Role Inventory to assess levels of femininity and masculinity. Results showed that higher levels of femininity were statistically significantly associated with a larger N170 amplitude in response to infant faces. This finding indicates that individuals who adhere more to sociocultural roles associated with femininity exhibit enhanced perceptual processing of infant faces at a very early stage. Our evidence underscores the potential contribution of cultural norms associated with gender to infant cue processing and highlights the need to consider different aspects of social gender in research in this area.