ORIGINAL PAPER The effect of infant-like characteristics on empathic concern for adults in need David A. Lishner Luis V. Oceja E. L. Stocks Kirstin Zaspel Published online: 9 September 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008 Abstract Three experiments tested the hypothesis that empathic concern for adults in need is enhanced by the degree of target infant-like characteristics. Participants reported feeling more empathic concern for an adult target with a more infant-like face than for an adult with a more adult-like face in a Spanish sample (Experiment 1) and in an American sample (Experiment 2). A similar effect was found when participants were presented with either an adult with a more infant-like voice or an adult with a more adult-like voice in a second American sample (Experi- ment 3). Additional analyses suggest that the infant-like characteristic effect on empathic concern is not mediated by observer perceptions of target attractiveness, target age or youthfulness, target vulnerability, or observer similarity to the target. These results support the proposition that infant-like cues enhance empathic concern in human observers and that the phenomenon generalizes across stimulus modality, gender, and nationality. Keywords Empathy  Empathic concern  Infant-like characteristics  Babyfacedness  Similarity  Vulnerability  Attractiveness  Age Infant-like characteristics are linked to a variety of per- ceptual phenomena (for a comprehensive review see Berry and McArthur 1986). For example, research suggests that observers attribute higher levels of honesty, kindness, warmth, naivete ´, social submissiveness, and physical weakness to babyfaced targets relative to non-babyfaced targets (McArthur and Apatow 1983/1984; Berry and McArthur 1985, 1986). Although interest in the effects of infant-like characteristics has focused primarily on per- ceptual responses of observers, ethologists such as Lorenz (1971) and Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1971) have long held that the key function of such features in humans and other organ- isms is to mobilize parental nurturant responses toward those who possess them. McDougall (1908) offers an early psychological account of the link between the perception of infant-like charac- teristics and nurturant responses. He suggests that infant- like characteristics signal a target’s vulnerability, the per- ception of which activates the parental instinct in humans. According to McDougall, the parental instinct is psycho- logically complex and consists of cognitive, affective, and connotative (motivational) components. Whereas the cog- nitive and connotative components are highly flexible and influenced by an individual’s learning history, the affective component is invariant. With regard to the parental instinct, McDougall suggests that perceptions of vulnerability (cognitive) elicit altruistic caregiving motives and tenden- cies (connotative) via activation of the tender emotion (affective). McDougall’s (1908) account is intriguing because he proposes that infant-like characteristics promote parental care by initiating an emotional-motivational response. Such a possibility appears to share some conceptual overlap with Panksepp’s (1998) model of mammalian parental care, which he believes is guided by an innate neural substrate D. A. Lishner (&)  K. Zaspel Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, 800 Algoma Blvd., Oshkosh, WI 54901, USA e-mail: lishnerd@uwosh.edu L. V. Oceja Despacho 83, Mo ´dulo 4, Departamento de Psicologı ´a Social y Metodologı ´a, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: luis.oceja@uam.es E. L. Stocks Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Tyler, Office 212B SCI, 3900, University Blvd., Tyler, TX 75799, USA e-mail: eric_stocks@uttyler.edu 123 Motiv Emot (2008) 32:270–277 DOI 10.1007/s11031-008-9101-5