Jennifer L. Rennels

Are attractive men's faces masculine or feminine? The importance of type of facial stimuli.

The authors investigated whether differences in facial stimuli could explain the inconsistencies in the facial attractiveness literature regarding whether adults prefer more masculine- or more feminine-looking male faces. Their results demonstrated that use of a female average to dimorphically transform a male facial average produced stimuli that did not accurately reflect the relationship between masculinity and attractiveness. In contrast, use of averages of masculine males and averages of feminine males produced stimuli that did accurately reflect the relationship between masculinity and attractiveness. Their findings suggest that masculinity contributes more to male facial attractiveness than does femininity, but future research should investigate how various combinations of facial cues contribute to male facial attractiveness.

Sex differences in facial scanning: Similarities and dissimilarities between infants and adults

When face processing studies find sex differences, male infants appear better at face recognition than female infants, whereas female adults appear better at face recognition than male adults. Both female infants and adults, however, discriminate emotional expressions better than males. To investigate if sex and age differences in facial scanning might account for these processing discrepancies, 3–4-month-olds, 9–10-month-olds, and adults viewed faces presented individually while an eye tracker recorded eye movements. Regardless of age, males shifted fixations between internal and external facial features more than females, suggesting more holistic processing. Females shifted fixations between internal facial features more than males, suggesting more second-order relational processing, which may explain females’ emotion discrimination advantage. Older male infants made more fixations than older female infants. Female adults made more fixations for shorter fixation durations than male adults. Male infants and female adults’ greater encoding of facial information may explain their face recognition advantage.

Caregiving experience and its relation to perceptual narrowing of face gender.

This research examined whether infants tested longitudinally at 10, 14, and 16 months of age (N = 58) showed evidence of perceptual narrowing based on face gender (better discrimination of female than male faces) and whether changes in caregiving experience longitudinally predicted changes in infants’ discrimination of male faces. To test face discrimination, infants participated in familiarization/novelty preference tasks and visual search tasks including female and male faces. At each age of participation, they were coded as having a female primary caregiver only or distributed caregiving experience (alternating experience with a female and male primary caregiver). Perceptual narrowing was evident for infants with a female primary caregiver, but only within the visual search task, which required location of a familiarized face among 3 novel distractor faces (exemplar-based discrimination); it was not evident within the familiarity/novelty preference task, which required discrimination between a familiarized and novel face (individual-based discrimination). Caregiving experience significantly explained individual changes in infants’ ability to locate male faces during the visual search task after 10 months. These data are the first to demonstrate flexibility of the face processing system in relation to gender discrimination when there is a change in caregiver within the infants’ natural environment after perceptual narrowing normally manifests.

Physical Attractiveness Stereotyping

The physical attractiveness stereotype affects evaluation of individuals within significant life contexts (e.g., friendships, romantic relationships, school, and work). More positive judgments of attractive than unattractive persons translate to better treatment of attractive than unattractive individuals. Attractive persons also display more positive behaviors and self-perceptions of themselves than unattractive persons, possibly as a result of this differential treatment or because the behavioral differences are inherent among individuals varying in attractiveness. Origins of the stereotype are evident during infancy, but more research is needed to understand the origins of the behavioral differences.

How Experience Affects Infants’ Facial Categorization

Abstract Given the importance of categorization abilities, infants appear equipped to group together people in their social world provided they have sufficient experience with the category. During the first year, however, infants have predominant experience with females and individuals of the same race as their primary caregiver. This differential experience impacts how expertly they categorize people in their social world. For example, they more expertly categorize (1) female relative to male faces and (2) familiar relative to unfamiliar race faces. Moreover, these discrepancies impact how they categorize faces within the two genders—they most easily categorize faces similar to an attractive, female-like representation and use attractiveness to categorize females and low masculinity to categorize males. Because categorization of people into social groups is necessary before affective and cognitive beliefs become linked to those groups, understanding these asymmetries in infants’ social categorization is critical for examining later development of biases and stereotypes.

Attentional and affective biases for attractive females emerge early in development

Predominant experience with females early in development results in infants developing an attractive, female-like facial representation that guides childrens attention toward and affective preferences for attractive females. When combined with increased interest in the other sex at puberty, these early emerging biases might help explain the robust prosocial and financial biases men exhibit toward attractive women during adulthood.