No Evidence that People Born to Older Parents Show Weaker Preferences for Younger Adult Faces

Abstract

Purpose

People can judge others’ ages from face images somewhat accurately and tend to rateyounger adults’ faces as more attractive than older adults’ faces. However, individual diff erences inthe strength of this preference for younger adult faces have also been reported, whereby peopleborn to older parents (i.e., people whose parents were older when the participant was born) showedweaker preferences for younger adult faces. However, work showing this pattern of results used facestimuli in which cues of age were experimentally manipulated using computer-graphics methods andmany researchers have recently raised concerns about how well fi ndings obtained using such stimuligeneralise to ratings of natural (i.e., unmanipulated) face images.

Methods

In light of the above, we tested whether people born to older parents showed weakerpreferences for younger faces when rating the attractiveness of natural (i.e., unmanipulated) faceimages.

Results

Although our analyses demonstrated that participants generally showed strong preferencesfor younger adult faces, the strength of these preferences was not signifi cantly correlated withparental age at birth.

Conclusions

Thus, our results do not support the proposal that parental age at birth infl uencespreferences for facial cues of age.