Perceptions of facial attractiveness across development.

Lead Research Organisation: Durham University
Department Name: Psychology

Abstract

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Description In study 1, we documented, for the first time, how our preferences for certain 'attractive' facial features develop across childhood, from 4 to 17 years of age. Generally, the ability to explicitly feel a preference for symmetric over asymemtric faces, and healthy over unthealthy faces, appears around about ages 6-9, and increases by age 17, often with a dip or plateau around 10-14 years.
In Study 2 we found evidence that the current strength of relationship between a parent and child predicts the degree to which the child likes faces which resemble the parent. In contrast, there was no evidence that the past relationship between parent and child predicted the current liking for parent-like faces. This suggests that the tendancy in heterosexual adults to prefer partners which somewhat resemble our opposite sex parent, may be built on childhood associations with our parents.
Exploitation Route The results of Study 1 provide rich grounds for further research investigating the emergence of adult physical attraction. In particular, our results in the 4-10 year olds suggest that adrenal hormones, released in the early stages of puberty, may activate an interest in these features. Our results amongst the 10-14 year olds suggest that cognitive changes during puberty may also have a delaying-impact on the overal trajectory of emergence.

The results of Study 2 demonstrate the potential for low level associative learning (i.e. currently feeling warm about parents leads to liking parent-like faces) to underlie phenomena which had been seen as relating to fixed early mechanisms. These results are being taken forwards in research addressing how we learn about kinship cues, and how learning experiences may shape what we find attractive in other respects.
Sectors Other
 
Title Attraction across development data 
Description Facial preferences of 346 children aged 4-17 years of age, for faces manipulated on symmetry, averageness, healthiness and femiminity. These are the underlying data of the output Boothroyd et al (2014) Evol Hum Behav. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2012 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact None at the present time. 
URL http://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=850584&type=Data%20catalogue