Baby fever: Situational cues shift the desire to have children via empathic emotions.

The desire to have children is often regarded as a deep, biologically driven desire or a rational decision based on weighing costs and benefits. Based on these assumptions, many people believe that the desire to have children is unchanging. However, the studies presented here indicate that the desire to have children is readily shifted by subtle situational cues, such as advertisements and social media feeds depicting positive images of parents and children. In four studies (N = 1,093), we randomly assigned young adults (ages 18-35) without children to view images of parents and children or control images. We found that positive parent-child images led young adults to a greater desire to have children via increases in empathic emotions both immediately (Studies 1-4) and 3 days later (Study 3), but viewing negative parent-child images did not decrease the desire to have children (Study 2). The results of our studies suggest that portrayals of parents and children may temporarily influence young adults' desires to have children. Given the abundance of parent-child images on social media and intense societal pressure to have children, small changes in the desire to have children may accrue over time to influence child-rearing decisions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).