Baby study suggests beauty is not in the eye of the beholder

Babies come into the world with a genetic predisposition to favouring pretty faces rather than ugly ones, according to a new study.

The five-year programme at Exeter University was the first to examine newborn infants’ reactions to a series of 30 photographs of female faces.Dr Alan Slater, a psychology lecturer in child infancy who led the research, said he was surprised by the findings.

“To my complete surprise there was a strong effect of attractive and unattractive photos on infants.” he said.

“I didn’t for one moment believe we’d get these kinds of results from newborns. I was convinced it was a learned process. Our research shows that perception of beauty is something genetic rather than socially constructed.”

Slater and eight researchers showed photos of white female models and non-models to babies for up to five minutes.

They studied nearly 100 babies up to the age of three days and found a significant difference in the time babies looked at attractive and unatt-ractive photographs.

“They would spend 60-65% of the time looking at the attractive face,” Slater said.

Slater’s team also swapped the internal features – eyes, nose and mouth – of the attractive face with those of the unattractive face.

“The babies were more responsive to the internal features,” said Slater. “This means these features are what the infants used to determine the attractiveness of the face.”

Researchers also turned some images upside down, and the babies spent more time looking at faces in the correct position. “This suggests that the baby comes into the world with an inborn, innate representation of the human face that is orientated in the correct position ,” said Slater.

“It is important from an evolutionary point of view that the baby recognises that it is a face and is part of a human. It helps the baby to develop human relationships.”

Slater’s research team has interpreted the results of the study in a number of ways.

“The babies’ behaviour could be down to a prototype formation, which is when you see lots of faces and form a prototype so you can recognise what a face looks like,” he said.

“Our understanding is that babies like to look at attractive faces because they most resembles the prototype they’ve got in their brains.

“Given that we’ve found this in newborn infants who haven’t seen that many faces it suggests that they come into the world with an in-built representation of a face which happens to correspond to an attractive face.”

Slater rejected the argument that perception of beauty is a learned process.

He said: “If the concept of beauty is an entirely learned characteristic then the public wouldn’t consistently pick the same people as being attractive. If it was learned, it would mean infants seizing on their mothers, whatever she looked like, would regard her as being attractive .

“This would lead some to regard people like Angelina Jolie as being less beautiful but that’s not the case.

“You may love your mother to bits but you will recognise that she is not the most beautiful woman in the world.”

Dr Gwyneth Doherty- Sneddon, senior psychology lecturer at Stirling University in child development, said: “A fair bit of evolutionary psychology has been done which suggests visual perception is innate, but I think culture has a role to play too. There will be innate predisposition but that’s not to say that that perception will continue throughout your life.

“I’d say most psychologists would like to think that there is an interplay between culture and what is inherent.”

Slater said: “You could say that beauty is in the eye of beholder to some extent, but there is some kind of external standard against which we judge people to be beautiful. This judgement appears to be part of a genetic inheritance.”

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