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Proc Biol Sci. 2002 May 7; 269(1494): 873–880. | PMCID: PMC1690969 |
Facial attractiveness judgements reflect learning of parental age characteristics. David I Perrett, Ian S Penton-Voak, Anthony C Little, Bernard P Tiddeman, D Michael Burt, Natalie Schmidt, Roz Oxley, Nicholas Kinloch, and Louise Barrett School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews KY16 9JU, UK. dp@st-and.ac.uk Mate preferences are shaped by infant experience of parental characteristics in a wide variety of species. Similar processes in humans may lead to physical similarity between parents and mates, yet this possibility has received little attention. The age of parents is one salient physical characteristic that offspring may attend to. The current study used computer-graphic faces to examine how preferences for age in faces were influenced by parental age. We found that women born to 'old' parents (over 30) were less impressed by youth, and more attracted to age cues in male faces than women with 'young' parents (under 30). For men, preferences for female faces were influenced by their mother's age and not their father's age, but only for long-term relationships. These data indicate that judgements of facial attractiveness in humans reflect the learning of parental characteristics. The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (266K). These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article. - Bateson P. Sexual imprinting and optimal outbreeding. Nature. 1978 Jun 22;273(5664):659–660. [PubMed]
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