THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERCEPTIONS OF FACIAL ATTRACTIVENESS The Development of Perceptions of Facial Attractiveness By

iii There is strong agreement among adults both within and across cultures as to which faces are attractive (Langlois et al., 2000), and these perceptions can affect social interactions via the ‘beauty is good ’ stereotype (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972). Adults perceive faces that are symmetrical to be more attractive than faces that are less symmetrical (Perrett et al., 1999), and faces that approximate the population average to be more attractive than most other faces (Langlois & Roggman, 1990). I examined the development of the influence of symmetry and averageness on children’s judgments of facial attractiveness in the faces of children and adults. In the work presented in chapters 2 and 3, I presented children and adults with pairs of faces that had been transformed to be more symmetrical and less symmetrical (chapter 2) or closer and farther from their group average (chapter 3). On each trial, participants selected which face was more attractive from the pair. I found that symmetry did not influence 5-year-olds ’ judgments of attractiveness, but it did influence 9-year-olds ’ judgments of attractiveness although to a lesser extent than those of adults. I additionally found that averageness strongly influenced 5-year