Adult age and gender differences in perceptions of facial attractiveness: beauty is in the eye of the older beholder

The authors examined ratings of facial attractiveness, rankings of faces and reasons given by young, middle-aged, and older men and women for young, middle-aged, and older male and female face attractiveness. No support for predictions derived from similarity, interest, and cohort hypotheses was obtained. In support of the expertise hypothesis, young and middle-aged adults rated younger faces as more attractive than old faces, whereas older adults rated all aged faces equally. In support of the crone hypothesis, older female faces were rated the lowest of all faces. Theoretical implications and real-world applications are discussed.     

Evidence for a young adult face bias in accuracy and consensus of age estimates

Adults' face processing may be specialized for the dimensions of young adult faces. For example, young and older adults exhibit increased accuracy in normality judgments and greater agreement in attractiveness ratings for young versus older adult faces. The present study was designed to examine whether there is a similar young adult face bias in facial age estimates. In Experiment 1, we created a face age continuum by morphing an averaged young adult face with an averaged older adult face in 5% increments, for a total of 21 faces ranging from 0 to 100% old. Young and older adults estimated facial age for three stimulus age categories [young (morphs 0–30%), middle‐aged (morphs 35–65%), and older adult (morphs 70–100%)]. Both age groups showed the least differentiation in age estimates for young adult faces, despite showing greater consensus across participants in estimates for young faces. In Experiment 2, young and older adults made age estimates for individual young and older adult identities. Both age groups were more accurate and showed greater consensus in age estimates for young faces. Collectively, these results provide evidence for a bias in processing young adult faces beyond that which is often observed in recognition and normality/attractiveness judgment tasks.     

Age differences in perceptions of memory strategy effectiveness for recent and remote memory

We examined whether young and older adults hold different beliefs about the effectiveness of memory strategies for specific types of memory tasks and whether memory strategies are perceived to be differentially effective for young, middle-aged, and older targets. Participants rated the effectiveness of five memory strategies for 10 memory tasks at three target ages (20, 50, and 80 years old). Older adults did not strongly differentiate strategy effectiveness, viewing most strategies as similarly effective across memory tasks. Young adults held strategy-specific beliefs, endorsing external aids and physical health as more effective than a positive attitude or internal strategies, without substantial differentiation based on task. We also found differences in anticipated strategy effectiveness for targets of different ages. Older adults described cognitive and physical health strategies as more effective for older than middle-aged targets, whereas young adults expected these strategies to be equally effective for middle-aged and older target adults.     

Effects of induced sad mood on facial emotion perception in young and older adults

Older adults perceive less intense negative emotion in facial expressions compared to younger counterparts. Prior research has also demonstrated that mood alters facial emotion perception. Nevertheless, there is little evidence which evaluates the interactive effects of age and mood on emotion perception. This study investigated the effects of sad mood on younger and older adults’ perception of emotional and neutral faces. Participants rated the intensity of stimuli while listening to sad music and in silence. Measures of mood were administered. Younger and older participants’ rated sad faces as displaying stronger sadness when they experienced sad mood. While younger participants showed no influence of sad mood on happiness ratings of happy faces, older adults rated happy faces as conveying less happiness when they experienced sad mood. This study demonstrates how emotion perception can change when a controlled mood induction procedure is applied to alter mood in young and older participants.     

Effects of Encoding Tasks on the Own-Age Face Recognition Bias

In the current study, we evaluated the own-age face recognition bias by using various encoding tasks to evaluate the robustness and potential limitations of the own-age bias. One hundred sixty young adults studied photographs of children, young adults, middle-aged adults, and older adults and were assigned to one of four encoding conditions (i.e., age estimate, attractiveness rating, friendliness rating, and a face search task). Subsequent recognition tests revealed a robust own-age bias such that participants recognized own-age faces better than other-age faces regardless of encoding task. The current study showed that encoding tasks that focus on socially relevant characteristics (i.e., attractiveness ratings and friendliness ratings) do not eliminate or weaken the own-age bias compared to tasks that specifically focus on the age of the face. These findings indicate that in-group/out-group categorization requires little conscious processing and may be automatic, which is consistent with Sporer's (2001) in-group/out-group model (IOM) of facial processing.     

Face likeability mediates the memory-enhancing effect of face attractiveness in young but not older adults

Evidence of effects of face attractiveness on memory is mixed and little is known about the underlying mechanisms of this relationship. Previous work suggests a possible mediating role of affective responding to faces (i.e., face likeability) on the relationship between face attractiveness and memory. Age-related change in social motivation may reduce the relevance of face attractiveness in older adults, with downstream effects on memory. In the present study, 50 young and 51 older participants were presented with face-trait pairs. Faces varied in attractiveness. Participants then completed a face-trait associative recognition memory task and provided likeability ratings for each face. There was a memory-enhancing effect of face attractiveness in young (but not older) participants, which was partially mediated by face likeability. In addition, more attractive and less attractive (compared to moderately attractive) faces were more likely remembered by both young and older participants. This quadratic effect of face attractiveness on memory was not mediated by face likeability. Findings are discussed in the context of motivational influences on memory that vary with age.     

Are children's faces really more appealing than those of adults? Testing the baby schema hypothesis beyond infancy

This study examined adults’ evaluations of likeability and attractiveness of children’s faces from infancy to early childhood. We tested whether Lorenz’s baby schema hypothesis (Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie (1943), Vol. 5, pp. 235-409) is applicable not only to infant faces but also to faces of children at older ages. Adult participants were asked to evaluate children’s faces from early infancy to 6 years of age in terms of their likeability and attractiveness, and these judgments were compared with those of adult faces. It was revealed that adults judged faces of younger children as more likeable and attractive than faces of older children, which were in turn judged as more likeable and attractive than adult faces. However, after approximately 4.5 years of age, the baby schema no longer affected adults’ judgments of children’s facial likeability and attractiveness. These findings suggest that the baby schema affects adults’ judgments of not only infant faces but also young children’s faces. This influence beyond infancy is likely due to the fact that facial cranial growth is gradual during early childhood and certain crucial infantile facial cues remain readily available during this period. Future studies need to identify these specific cues to better understand why adults generally show positive responses to infantile faces and how such positive responses influence the establishment and maintenance of social relationships between young children and adults.     

Young and old faces in young and old heads: the factor of age in face recognition.

Research on aging and face recognition has shown age-related differences that are reflected most clearly in false-alarm errors. Elderly subjects exceed young adults in false recognitions that new faces are "old." To determine if this difference between young and elderly subjects might differ for young versus elderly faces, an experiment was conducted in which half of the young and elderly subjects studied and recognized young and middle-aged faces, and the remainder studied and recognized middle-aged and elderly faces. Replicating prior research, age-related deficits in recognition accuracy (d') were reduced with older faces, and this effect generalized from measures of face recognition to measures of face-picture recognition. However, the age-related increase in false recognitions of faces was not affected by face age.     

Social categorization and individuation in the own‐age bias

Young adults recognize other young adult faces more accurately than older adult faces, an effect termed the own‐age bias (OAB). The categorization‐individuation model (CIM) proposes that recognition memory biases like the OAB occur as unfamiliar faces are initially quickly categorized. In‐group faces are seen as socially relevant which motivates the processing of individuating facial features. Outgroup faces are processed more superficially with attention to category‐specific information which hinders subsequent recognition. To examine the roles of categorization and individuation in the context of the OAB, participants completed a face recognition task and a speeded age categorization task including young and older adult faces. In the recognition task, half of the participants were given instructions aimed to encourage individuation of other‐age faces. An OAB emerged that was not influenced by individuation instructions, but the magnitude of the OAB was correlated with performance in the categorization task. The larger the categorization advantage for older adult over young adult faces, the larger the OAB. These results support the premise that social categorization processes can affect the subsequent recognition of own‐ and other‐age faces, but do not provide evidence for the effectiveness of individuation instructions in reducing the OAB.     

Stable middle-aged face recognition: No moderation of the own-age bias across contexts

The own-age bias (OAB) has been proposed to be caused by perceptual expertise and/or social-cognitive mechanisms. Investigations into the role of social cognition have, however, yielded mixed results. One reason for this might be the tendency for research to focus on the OAB in young adults, between young and older adult faces where other-age individuation experience is low. To explore whether social-cognitive manipulations may be successful when observers have sufficient other-age individuation experience, we examined biases involving middle-aged other-age faces and the influence of a context manipulation. Across four experiments, young adult participants were presented with middle-aged faces alongside young or older adult faces to remember. We predicted that in contexts where middle-aged faces were positioned as other-age faces (alongside young adult faces), recognition performance would be worse than when they were positioned as relative own-age faces (alongside older adult faces). However, the context manipulations did not moderate middle age face recognition. This suggests that past findings that context does not change other-age face recognition holds for other-age faces for which observers have higher individuation experience. These findings are consistent with a perceptual expertise account of the OAB but more investigation of the generality of these results is required.     

Representing young and older adult faces: Shared or age-specific prototypes?

ABSTRACT

Young adults recognize young adult faces more accurately than older adult faces and are more sensitive to how individual young faces deviate from a norm/prototype. Here we used an adaptation paradigm to examine whether young and older adult faces are represented by separable norms and the extent to which the coding dimensions for these two categories overlap. In Experiment 1, following adaptation to oppositely distorted young and older faces (e.g., expanded young and compressed older faces), adults’ normality judgments simultaneously shifted in opposite directions for the two face categories, providing evidence for separable norms. In Experiment 2, participants were adapted to distorted faces from a single age category (e.g., compressed young); aftereffects transferred across face age but were larger for the face age that matched adaptation. Collectively, these results provide evidence that young and older faces are processed with regard to separable norms that share some underlying coding dimensions.     

Children's perceptions of and beliefs about facial maturity

The author studied children's and young adult's perceptions of facial age and beliefs about the sociability, cognitive ability, and physical fitness of adult faces. From pairs of photographs of adult faces, participants (4-6 years old, 8-10 years old, 13-16 years old, and 19-23 years old) selected the one face that appeared younger, older, better at remembering, smarter, more caring, friendlier, healthier, or stronger. Pairings consisted of faces at different adult age levels (young adults, middle-age adults, older adults, and very old adults.) Older participants were more sensitive to age differences in older faces and to faces more proximal in age. Children and adolescents believed that very old adult faces appeared to be less cognitively able than middle-aged faces (for children) and young adult faces (for adolescents). Very old male faces were judged to be less sociable. Old and very old faces were judged to be less physically fit than young and middle-aged faces. Significant positive correlation coefficients were found between the youngest children's abilities to discriminate between the adult faces of proximal age and youthful biases when selecting faces appearing to be more sociable and cognitively able. The results are discussed with respect to the development of facial information-processing skills and how those skills may be associated with the development of and changes in beliefs about older adults.     

The role of facial attractiveness and facial masculinity/femininity in sex classification of faces

We tested whether adults (experiment 1) and 4 - 5-year-old children (experiment 2) identify the sex of highly attractive faces faster and more accurately than not very attractive faces in a reaction-time task. We also assessed whether facial masculinity/femininity facilitated identification of sex. Results showed that attractiveness facilitated adults' sex classification of both female and male faces and children's sex classification of female, but not male, faces. Moreover, attractiveness affected the speed and accuracy of sex classification independently of masculinity/femininity. High masculinity in male faces, but not high femininity in female faces, also facilitated sex classification for both adults and children. These findings provide important new data on how the facial cues of attractiveness and masculinity/femininity contribute to the task of sex classification and provide evidence for developmental differences in how adults and children use these cues. Additionally, these findings provide support for Langlois and Roggman's (1990 Psychological Science 1 115 121) averageness theory of attractiveness.     

The own‐age face recognition bias is task dependent

The own‐age bias (OAB) in face recognition (more accurate recognition of own‐age than other‐age faces) is robust among young adults but not older adults. We investigated the OAB under two different task conditions. In Experiment 1 young and older adults (who reported more recent experience with own than other‐age faces) completed a match‐to‐sample task with young and older adult faces; only young adults showed an OAB. In Experiment 2 young and older adults completed an identity detection task in which we manipulated the identity strength of target and distracter identities by morphing each face with an average face in 20% steps. Accuracy increased with identity strength and facial age influenced older adults' (but not younger adults') strategy, but there was no evidence of an OAB. Collectively, these results suggest that the OAB depends on task demands and may be absent when searching for one identity.     

Average faces are average faces

Photographs of faces of young adult male and female Scots were measured on nineteen frontal dimensions. Measures in each dimension were converted to z-scores and summed for each face. For each sex, the ten faces closest to the average summed z-score and the ten most distant from it were rated for attractiveness by white male and female New Zealand undergraduates. Raters agreed significantly in ordering the faces in attractiveness, but did not rate faces close to the “population” average differently from those distant from it. Tested for the first time with actual rather than contrived faces, the commonly reported hypothesis that faces representing the average of a population are attractive is not supported.     

Average faces are average faces

Photographs of faces of young adult male and female Scots were measured on nineteen frontal dimensions. Measures in each dimension were converted to z-scores and summed for each face. For each sex, the ten faces closest to the average summed z-score and the ten most distant from it were rated for attractiveness by white male and female New Zealand undergraduates. Raters agreed significantly in ordering the faces in attractiveness, but did not rate faces close to the “population” average differently from those distant from it. Tested for the first time with actual rather than contrived faces, the commonly reported hypothesis that faces representing the average of a population are attractive is not supported.     

Emotion identification across adulthood using the Dynamic FACES database of emotional expressions in younger,middle aged,and older adults

Facial stimuli are widely used in behavioural and brain science research to investigate emotional facial processing. However, some studies have demonstrated that dynamic expressions elicit stronger emotional responses compared to static images. To address the need for more ecologically valid and powerful facial emotional stimuli, we created Dynamic FACES, a database of morphed videos (n?=?1026) from younger, middle-aged, and older adults displaying naturalistic emotional facial expressions (neutrality, sadness, disgust, fear, anger, happiness). To assess adult age differences in emotion identification of dynamic stimuli and to provide normative ratings for this modified set of stimuli, healthy adults (n?=?1822, age range 18–86 years) categorised for each video the emotional expression displayed, rated the expression distinctiveness, estimated the age of the face model, and rated the naturalness of the expression. We found few age differences in emotion identification when using dynamic stimuli. Only for angry faces did older adults show lower levels of identification accuracy than younger adults. Further, older adults outperformed middle-aged adults’ in identification of sadness. The use of dynamic facial emotional stimuli has previously been limited, but Dynamic FACES provides a large database of high-resolution naturalistic, dynamic expressions across adulthood. Information on using Dynamic FACES for research purposes can be found at http://faces.mpib-berlin.mpg.de.     

Developmental changes in perceptions of attractiveness: a role of experience?

In three experiments, we traced the development of the adult pattern of judgments of attractiveness for faces that have been altered to have internal features in low, average, or high positions. Twelve-year-olds and adults demonstrated identical patterns of results: they rated faces with features in an average location as significantly more attractive than faces with either low or high features. Although both 4-year-olds and 9-year-olds rated faces with high features as least attractive, unlike adults and 12-year-olds, they rated faces with low and average features as equally attractive. Three-year-olds with high levels of peer interaction, but not those with low levels of peer interaction, chose faces with low features as significantly more attractive than those with high-placed features, possibly as a result of their increased experience with the proportions of the faces of peers. Overall, the pattern of results is consistent with the hypothesis that experience influences perceptions of attractiveness, with the proportions of the faces participants see in their everyday lives influencing their perceptions of attractiveness.     

How Much Older Do You Get When a Wrinkle Appears on Your Face? Modifying Age Estimates by Number of Wrinkles

ABSTRACT

The present study investigated the influence of wrinkles on facial age judgments. In Experiment 1, preadolescents, young adults, and middle-aged adults made categorical age judgments for male and female faces. The qualitative (type of wrinkle) and quantitative (density of wrinkles and depth of furrows) contributions of wrinkles were analyzed. Results indicated that the greater the number of wrinkles and the depth of furrows, the older a face was rated. The roles of the gender of the face and the age of the participants were discussed. In Experiment 2, participants performed relative age judgments by comparing pairs of faces. Results revealed that the number of wrinkles had more influence on the perceived facial age than the type of wrinkle. A MDS analysis showed the main dimensions on which participants based their judgments, namely, the number of wrinkles and the depth of furrows. We conclude that the quantitative component is more likely to increase perceived facial age. Nevertheless, other variables, such as the gender of the face and the age of the participants, also seem to be involved in the age estimation process.     

The psychological distance of memories: Examining causal relations with mood and self-esteem in young,middle-aged and older adults

Three studies examined the self-enhancement function of autobiographical memory (measured with subjective temporal distance of memories). Participants recalled a memory of an attained and a failed goal and rated the subjective distance between each memory and the present. Study 1 showed that young adults with higher self-esteem felt closer to memories of attained goals and farther from failure memories than those with lower self-esteem. In Study 2, young, middle-aged and older adults with higher self-esteem felt closer to success memories, whereas self-esteem was unrelated to the temporal distance of failure memories. In both studies, feeling closer to success memories (and far from failure) led to enhanced mood. In Study 3, state self-esteem was experimentally manipulated. The manipulation had no effect on young and older adults, but middle-aged adults whose self-esteem was decreased, felt closer to success memories than failure memories. Results are discussed in relation to the temporal self-appraisal theory.