Abstract

We examined the relationship between infant attractiveness and adult affect by investigating whether differing levels of infant facial attractiveness elicit facial muscle movement correlated with positive and negative affect from adults (N = 87) using electromyography. Unattractive infant faces evoked significantly more corrugator supercilii and levator labii superioris movement (physiological correlates of negative affect) than attractive infant faces. These results suggest that unattractive infants may be at risk for negative affective responses from adults, though the relationship between those responses and caregiving behavior remains elusive.

Disscusion

As expected, we found a strong relationship between participants’ physiological negative affective reactions, as measured by muscle movement, and the attractiveness of infant faces. This was true both for the CS site and the LLS site and indicates that unattractive infant faces elicit more general negative affect as well as more disgust reactions than attractive infant faces. These results parallel Principe and Langlois’ (2011) findings with adult faces and demonstrate that affective responses are stable across facial stimuli regardless of the age of the stimuli. Adults are sensitive to the attractiveness of both adult and infant faces, and accordingly display movement of facial muscles that are correlated with emotional reactions to these faces. Results from Langlois et al. (1995) suggested this in real interactions where mothers engaged in more affectionate behavior with attractive than unattractive infants.

Our findings also parallel both Principe and Langlois (2011) and Hildebrandt and Fitzgerald (1978) in failing to find a result for the ZM muscle in response to attractive facial stimuli. The CS and LLS findings, paired with the lack of ZM finding, provide support for the ugly-is-bad model outlined by Griffin and Langlois (2006), which describes attractiveness stereotypes as being driven by negative responses to unattractive faces, rather than positive responses to attractive faces.

Other studies (Stephan & Langlois, 1984; Ritter et al., 1991) have shown that adults make judgments about infants’ personalities, behavior, and abilities based on their attractiveness, but the current study is the first to directly indicate that infant attractiveness may also influence adults’ physiological affective reactions. The muscle movements demonstrated in the present study indicate that adults are processing and affectively reacting to those differences in infant attractiveness. Additionally, the finding that these affective responses are generally driven by negative affect toward unattractive infants, rather than positive affect toward attractive infants, is important one.

(N Count / Sample Size = 87)