(654 kB) LM DeBruine (2004). Resemblance to self increases the appeal of child faces to both men and women. Evolution and Human Behavior, 25: 142-154.

Platek et al. (2002, 2003) reported that facial resemblance between self and a child increases professed willingness to invest in that child, and does so much more for men than for women. Because facial resemblance is a possible cue of kinship and men, unlike women, can be mistaken about parenthood, Platek et al. predicted and interpreted this sex difference as an adaptation whereby men allocate parental investment in proportion to cues of the likelihood of paternity. Extending their approach using a more realistic technique for manipulating facial resemblance and eliminating some of the confounds in their methodology, facial resemblance was found to increase attractiveness judgments and hypothetical investment decisions, although the published sex difference was not found. This could not be explained by differences in resemblance between the participants and the morphed images because a separate group of observers could match the original adult images to the new morphs as accurately as to morphs made using Platek et al.'s method. In addition, composite scores indicating positive regard toward an image were correlated with resemblance as judged by these independent observers.

Figure 1
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Figure 1. Comparison of the method used in Platek et al. (2002, 2003) to that used in this study. Platek resized an experimental participant's face (a, b) to the same aspect ratio as a child's face (c) and blended the two faces together in a 50/50 ratio to produce a child morph (d). In this study, I transformed a participant's face (a) to have neotenous proportions (e), and blended it in a 50/50 ratio with a child's face (f) to produce a more child-like morph (g).
Figure 2
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Figure 2. The stimulus presentation interface for the matching experiment. Each of the five child morphs was made from the same child face and one of five adult faces who were in the same testing unit and who had viewed the same stimuli. In seven randomized blocks, judges matched all 53 participant adults to one image from an array of the five. The seven blocks were the five image sets that the adult participant had viewed in the hypothetical investment decisions experiment and two image sets made from male and female child morphs using Platek et al.'s method. (The correct answer for this array is d.)
Five babies
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Five different infant faces were separately blended with one adult face to make the five faces you see here. (Figure not in paper.)

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