Our Mental Images of Children

Hello everyone!

This is Marina Iosifyan from the previous newsletter. I joined the research team to explore how and why children increase prosocial motivation among adults. I was lucky enough to arrive in the UK from Russia just before the coronavirus pandemic hit. As you might expect, the pandemic has had a substantial impact on our research. For example, we had to put on hold a field study that we were conducting in a museum café to test whether donations from visitors are higher when images of children are present than when such images are absent. Despite having to put this study on hold, we have been fortunate enough to conduct several exciting experiments online!

One of these studies investigated people’s mental representations of children. People derive a great amount of information about others, such as their age, gender and personality traits, simply by looking at their faces. It also is the case that our attitudes towards people affect the way we imagine how they look. We wanted to look at the mental visual representations that people have of a typical child, using a psychophysical method called reverse correlation. This method asks people to look at pixelated images of a target and to choose one which looks more like a typical child. From these choices, an average face can be generated. Here is how a sample of 137 British participants mentally represented a typical child in our study:

Part of our interest in carrying out this study was to see how people with different attitudes towards children visualise them. For example, do people who feel positive toward children have a different visual representation of a typical child compared to people who find children to be stressful? To test this question, we developed an average image generated by people who feel stressed by children and an average image generated by people who feel more affectionate towards children.

Image generated by people who feel affectionate towards children

Image generated by people who feel stressed by children

Can you spot the differences between the two images? When we asked a separate group of people to evaluate these images, we found that people who feel affectionate or stressed towards children indeed mentally visualise children differently. The image generated by people who feel more affectionate towards children was evaluated as more happy, calm, and friendly, whereas the image generated by people who feel stressed by children was evaluated as more sad, anxious, and selfish. This difference emerged despite the fact that these raters had no idea how these two faces were generated.

In another study we are conducting right now, we are investigating the psychological mechanism behind the child salience effect – our finding that the presence of children increases prosocial motivation among adults. We are trying to understand why this effect happens, that is, why do adults act more pro-socially in the presence of children? We have several assumptions we want to examine closely. First, the presence of children might directly increase the desire to help others (we can call it a motivational mechanism). However, it is also possible that child salience simply makes helping behavior more cognitively accessible. A set of experimental studies we are conducting will help us to better understand the nature of the child salience effect. We will hopefully be able to share new insights on this question about the underlying psychological mechanism in our next newsletter, stay tuned!