People spend a disproportionate amount of time looking at faces, and facial perception has been cited as “the most highly developed visual skill in humans” with extensive neural circuitry devoted to such processing (Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2000, p. 223). Many levels of information are embedded in faces, such as sex, race, age, and identity, and these attributes are quickly assessed by observers (Dupuis-Roy et al., 2009, Ekman, 1978 and Zebrowitz and Montepare, 2008). Facial features further provide information on a target's intellectual status, such as mental retardation (Streissguth, Herman, & Smith, 1978), and mental health, as in the case of schizophrenia (Ekman & Fridlund, 1987). Moreover, bilateral facial symmetry, an indicator of the ability to resist perturbations during prenatal development, has been shown to be a reliable, objective indicator of health and longevity (Scheib et al., 1999 and Shackelford and Larsen, 1999).
Judgments of facial attractiveness tend to hold up cross-culturally (Bernstein et al., 1982, Cunningham et al., 1995, Iliffe, 1960, Langlois and Roggman, 1990 and Zebrowitz et al., 1993a). As such, facial attractiveness likely serves an adaptive function and has been a key point in sexual selection (Fink and Penton-Voak, 2002 and Grammer and Thornhill, 1994). Gangestad, Thornhill, and Yeo (1994) found that facial attractiveness predicted developmental stability, suggesting that facial attractiveness is an honest signal of mate value cuing genetic quality. Additionally, many studies (e.g., Little et al., 2008, Perrett et al., 1999 and Scheib et al., 1999) have shown positive associations between facial symmetry and ratings of attractiveness.
Whereas facial attractiveness serves as an ultimate signal for good genes, social psychologists have shown that people subscribe to a “what is beautiful is good” philosophy, and attractive individuals are rated as more intelligent, more social, kinder, better friends, and better romantic partners (Dion, Bersheid, & Walster, 1972). It is likely that this “halo effect” (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) serves the ultimate motive of finding a good mate.
Perceptions of physical attractiveness and its associated attributes are not limited to adults. Infants favor attractive adult faces and show positive affect toward attractive females (Langlois, Roggman, & Resier-Danner, 1990). These effects appear reciprocal because people look at attractive infants longer and smile more while looking at them (Hildebrandt & Fitzgerald, 1978). Even infants look longer at photographs of attractive infants (Van Duuren, Kendell-Scott, & Stark, 2006). Hildebrandt-Karraker and Stern (1990) reported that participants gave more positive ascriptions, such as being more sociable, easier to care for, and more competent, to attractive infants. Similarly, Stephan and Langlois (1984) demonstrated that the “beauty is good” stereotype was salient across ratings of infant appearance, with attractive infants being rated as smart, likable, and good, whereas unattractive babies were judged to cause parental problems. Stephan and Langlois suggested that such behavioral expectations are “strong and consistent” shortly after birth for attractive and unattractive infants.
The question is if facial attractiveness is indicative of good genes, are beautiful babies more likely to become beautiful adults? That is, does a person's level of attractiveness remain relatively constant over time (Caspi and Bern, 1990 and Zebrowitz et al., 1993b)? Pittinger, Mark, and Johnson (1989) found that individual attractiveness was moderately stable from childhood to adulthood. Similarly, Sussman, Mueser, Grau, and Yarnold (1983) and Alley (1993) determined that facial attractiveness is somewhat stable from approximately 5 years of age to early adulthood. Further, Zebrowitz and colleagues (1993) found stability for individuals in a large sample of targets from about age 10 to adulthood, with a decrease in attractiveness as age increased in both sexes. Interestingly, however, they noted that appearance at an earlier age was “by no means a perfect predictor of appearance at the next” (p. 464). Although these studies provided evidence for stability of attractiveness, none examined attractiveness from infancy to adulthood.
In the present studies we examined the stability of facial attractiveness from infancy (24 months and younger) to early adulthood (16–18 years of age) as assessed by independent raters. As most previous research has found some stability in attractiveness, we expected that ratings of an infant's attractiveness would predict ratings of the target person's adult attractiveness. Further, because previous studies have shown men take less interest in infants than do women (Gaulin, 1980 and Turke, 1997), we anticipated that women would assign higher ratings of attractiveness to infants.
