No evidence that people born to older parents show weaker preferences for younger adult faces

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Li, Jingheng and Lee, Pengting and Rafiee, Yasaman and Jones, Benedict C. and Shiramizu, Victor K. M. (2025) No evidence that people born to older parents show weaker preferences for younger adult faces. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology. ISSN 2198-7335 (In Press) (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-025-00263-8)

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Abstract

People can judge others’ ages from face images somewhat accurately and tend to rate younger adults’ faces as more attractive than older adults’ faces. However, individual differences in the strength of this preference for younger adult faces have also been reported, whereby people born to older parents (i.e., people whose parents were older when the participant born) showed weaker preferences for younger adult faces. However, work showing this pattern of results used face stimuli in which cues of age were experimentally manipulated using computer-graphics methods and many researchers have recently raised concerns about how well findings obtained using such stimuli generalise to ratings of natural (i.e., unmanipulated) face images. Consequently, we tested whether people born to older parents showed weaker preferences for younger faces when rating the attractiveness of natural (i.e., unmanipulated) face images. Although our analyses demonstrated that participants generally showed strong preferences for younger adult faces, the strength of these preferences was not significantly correlated with parental age at birth. Thus, our results do not support the proposal that parental age at birth influences preferences for facial cues of age.

ORCID iDs

Li, Jingheng, Lee, Pengting, Rafiee, Yasaman ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5958-7876, Jones, Benedict C. ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7777-0220 and Shiramizu, Victor K. M. ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1669-2163;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)