Adults' preferences for side-of-hold as portrayed in paintings of the Madonna and Child

Abstract

Most women hold infants on their left side. They do the same when depicted in works of art. Does the latter accurately reflect the real-life bias, the artist's own aesthetic preference, or something else, such as the artist's handedness, sex, direction of attentional bias, or even the artist's own side-preference for holding infants? As a first step to finding out, we showed 272 young adults (85 men, 187 women) 20 pairs of paintings of the Madonna and Child, the original on one side, its mirror-reversal on the other, and asked which one they preferred. Along with assessing the effects of the variables already mentioned, we used equal numbers of paintings originally depicting left-holds and right-holds to control for the possible effects of differences between the paintings other than side-of-hold itself, such as in their colour scheme, background details, and the type of hold shown (e.g., cradle vs seated on lap). Each pair was presented twice, once with the original on the left, once on the right, for a total of 40 trials. Women and men alike more often preferred left-hold images, but the difference was significant only for women. Preferences were also stronger for original left-hold paintings than for the mirror-reversals of original right-hold paintings, suggesting that the originals differed in ways affecting preference beyond those we tried to control. Overall preference for left-hold images was enhanced when the images were on the viewer's left. As for the other variables, they were for the most part unrelated to preferences. The reasons for the preference thus remain unclear but it is evidently affected by multiple variables, with at least some clearly different from those affecting side-of-hold preferences of real mothers holding real infants.

Keywords:

• Laterality
• Side-of-hold
• Mothers
• Infants
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Madonna and Child

Acknowledgements

Some of the material in this article was presented, under a different title, at TENNET XVII, a conference on experimental and theoretical neuropsychology, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 21–23 June 2007. We thank Chris McManus and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions, and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for permission to reproduce the Photograph by Rick Wicker of the pre-Columbian artifact in Figure 1. ©0000 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Notes

¹We add “under natural circumstances” because a minority of reports through the early twentieth century in fact identified the right as the preferred side for holding. In these cases, however, the holders were not the infants’ mothers but rather their nurses (for middle- and upper-class families) and, as Burt (1937) suggested, the reason was that the nurse had been taught to hold on this side. Given that her “chief duties” consisted in “holding the infant in her arms”, carrying it outside for exercise, and “accompanying the mother in visiting, so as to relieve her from the fatigue of attention to the child” (Webster & Parkes, 1848, p. 1175), the rationale perhaps was that the right side was regarded as safer because it was normally stronger. Burt went on to suggest that in the absence of special instruction, the left side was preferred. For details, see Harris (in press).

²The left is also the more expressive side in men, but because artistic portrayals of men holding infants are so rare (estimated to account for less than 4% of paintings in Finger's 1975 survey; see also Harris, in press), the question of the relation in men between side-of-hold and side-of-face depicted is moot for all practical purposes.

³For artists, the only evidence for this possibility is the score for the Impressionist Mary Cassatt, one of 34 artists included in Finger's (1975) survey. By our count, of the 15 artists in that survey with at least 10 works represented, Cassatt showed left-holds in 66% of her paintings compared with 51.6% for the rest. But since the overall left bias increased beginning in the nineteenth century with the advent of Impressionism, the artists of that era would be the more appropriate comparison group. Unfortunately, only 2 of the 14 artists in that cohort were represented by at least 10 works—Renoir and Picasso—with left-hold scores of 60% and 44%, respectively. The question of sex differences, therefore, remains open.

⁴Of the total of 272 participants enrolled, everyone completed the picture preference task but not everyone completed all of the other tasks, so in this analysis as in some of the others, the numbers of participants varied slightly. In addition, all reported tests are two-tailed.