Abstract
Our reactions to facial self-resemblance could reflect either specialized responses to cues of kinship or by-products of the general perceptual mechanisms of face encoding and mere exposure. The adaptive hypothesis predicts differences in reactions to self-resemblance in mating and prosocial contexts, while the by-product hypothesis does not. Using face images that were digitally transformed to resemble participants, I showed that the effects of resemblance on attractiveness judgements depended on both the sex of the judge and the sex of the face being judged: facial resemblance increased attractiveness judgements of same-sex faces more than other-sex faces, despite the use of identical procedures to manipulate resemblance. A control experiment indicated these effects were caused neither by lower resemblance of other-sex faces than same-sex faces, nor by an increased perception of averageness or familiarity of same-sex faces due to prototyping or mere exposure affecting only same-sex faces. The differential impact of self-resemblance on our perception of same-sex and other-sex faces supports the hypothesis that humans use facial resemblance as a cue of kinship.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 2085-2090 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. B, Biological Sciences |
Volume | 271 |
Issue number | 1552 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Oct 2004 |
Keywords
- kin recognition
- faces
- attractiveness
- self-resemblance
- inbreeding avoidance
- human female preferences
- married-couples
- mate choice
- similarity
- average
- appearance
- perception
- dimorphism
- beautiful
- homogany