The Women Who Stare at Babies

A drooling baby face is not equally exciting to everyone around it. A new study says that young women who like the idea of motherhood get more enjoyment than their peers from staring at infants' faces. But they don't love all of those chubby mugs equally. Even more than the baby-neutral, wannabe moms are biased toward the cutest ones. Amanda Hahn is a researcher at the University of Glasgow's "Face Research Lab," directed by psychologists Lisa DeBruine and Benedict Jones. (On their website you can see an averaged photo of all seven lab members' faces, because of course.) Hahn is especially interested in motivation. For this study, she wanted to know what drives people to look at photos of babies—or not. Hahn focused on heterosexual women with no children of their own. She recruiting 200 subjects online; their average age was about 22. As for the baby pictures, Hahn started ...