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, 11 (2). 9. ISSN 2198-7335 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-025-00263-8)

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Abstract

Purpose: People can judge others’ ages from face images somewhat accurately and tend to rateyounger adults’ faces as more attractive than older adults’ faces. However, individual diff erences inthe strength of this preference for younger adult faces have also been reported, whereby peopleborn to older parents (i.e., people whose parents were older when the participant was born) showedweaker preferences for younger adult faces. However, work showing this pattern of results used facestimuli in which cues of age were experimentally manipulated using computer-graphics methods andmany researchers have recently raised concerns about how well fi ndings obtained using such stimuligeneralise to ratings of natural (i.e., unmanipulated) face images. Methods: In light of the above, we tested whether people born to older parents showed weakerpreferences for younger faces when rating the attractiveness of natural (i.e., unmanipulated) faceimages. Results: Although our analyses demonstrated that participants generally showed strong preferencesfor younger adult faces, the strength of these preferences was not signifi cantly correlated withparental age at birth. Conclusions: Thus, our results do not support the proposal that parental age at birth infl uencespreferences 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)