Facial Muscle Responses to Child-Related Emotional Stimuli Among Expecting Fathers, First-Time Fathers, and Fathers With Multiple Children

Empathy supports effective caregiving, as parents rely on infants’ non-verbal signals to guide their responses. Emerging evidence suggests that men undergo hormonal and neural changes related to empathy during the transition to parenthood. This study investigated men’s empathic reactions towards children by comparing groups at different stages of fatherhood to test a proposal that expecting and first-time fathers show heightened empathic reactivity to children’s distress. With pre-registered analyses, we compared three groups: expecting fathers (N = 35), first-time fathers (N = 44), and fathers of more than one child (N = 39). Participants completed a Picture task and a Video task involving emotional child stimuli. Their facial muscle responses were measured using facial electromyography (zygomaticus and corrugator muscles). Participants also reported their subjective emotional reactions and provided saliva samples for testosterone assessment. Only in the Picture task first-time fathers showed stronger corrugator activity to negative child stimuli when compared with expecting fathers, while self-reported empathy did not differentiate the groups. Testosterone was negatively associated with corrugator responses toward negative pictures of children, but only among expecting fathers. Although group differences were modest, these findings point to subtle shifts in fathers’ responsiveness during the transition to parenthood and indicate that early fatherhood may represent a period of heightened responsiveness to child distress.