**3. Early childhood**

Parental estimates of their 5- to 6.5-year-olds' experience with others showed that children at this age typically had more interactions with females than males as well [22]. Also, attractiveness continues to be a more salient cue among female than male adult targets. When 4- to 5-year-olds saw faces that varied in attractiveness and sex-stereotypicality (femininity for women; masculinity for men), children more quickly and accurately identified the sex of high attractive than low attractive women. In contrast, attractiveness did not facilitate how quickly or accurately children identified the sex of male faces, whereas masculinity did [43]. These data suggest 4- to 5-year-olds more fluently process high relative to low attractive women as female, but attractiveness does not significantly affect their fluency in classifying men as male. Such processing fluency is important because when adults easily process or classify an object, they briefly experience positive affect [17, 44]. Adults' processing fluency is also linked to positive evaluations of individuals [45]. If children also experience positive affect due to ease in processing, the fluency with which children process attractive female faces should affect their evaluations and information processing more so for attractive females than for attractive males. Indeed, such data are evident in studies looking at their attractiveness biases and recognition memory.

In a study assessing 3- to 11-year-olds' biases based on facial attractiveness, gender, and race, children assigned positive and negative attributes (e.g., "Who do you think is nice/mean?") to one of two unfamiliar peers (forced choice condition) or had the option to choose one of the targets, both targets, or neither target (non-forced choice condition). The target faces paired together were similar in age, sex, and race, but differed in attractiveness. When the targets were girls, children assigned significantly more positive attributes and less negative attributes to high attractive than low attractive girls than would be expected by chance, regardless of whether they were in the forced choice or non-forced choice condition. When the targets were boys, however, this discrepancy in assignment of more positive and less negative attributes to the attractive than unattractive boy was evident in the forced choice condition only. Thus, even when children were not forced to choose only one target for assignment of positive or negative attributes, they still highly favoured attractive girls, but showed similar allocation of positive and negative attributes to attractive and unattractive boys [46]. Interestingly, these same children were also likely to believe that attractive girls would think positively of them (i.e., that attractive girls would reciprocate these positive biases). Such dual beliefs might contribute to strengthening and maintaining attractiveness biases [47].

Using this paradigm, infants show an ability to categorize adult female faces based on attractiveness by 6 months of age. They show this ability regardless of whether they are familiarized to low attractive or high attractive females. Importantly, 6-month-olds also showed an ability to discriminate between the category exemplars, demonstrating they individuated the female faces, but still grouped faces together based on attractiveness level [40]. In contrast, 12-montholds attend more to males' facial masculinity than attractiveness when categorizing adult male faces—they group together low masculine males and exclude high masculine males from the category. Low masculine males' perceptual similarity to the infants' female-like facial representation might be what facilitates infants' ability to categorize these faces by 12 months of age [39]. Attractiveness, therefore, seems to be a more salient cue when infants view female relative to male faces and it guides their visual preferences for and categorization of adult females, but not necessarily adult males. This early asymmetry is important to consider because how children functionally group people in their social world serves as a precursor to the development of biases and stereotypes [41]. Also, beyond the first year, toddlers continue to have predominant experience with females. Survey data provided by parents regarding their 18 to 36-month-olds' facial experience over the course of one week showed that approximately 68% of their toddlers' social interactions were with females (**Figure 1**) and they allocated a significantly greater percentage of time attending to female than male faces during these interactions [21]. Given the substantial brain growth that occurs during the first three years of life [42], these experiences likely not only maintain, but strengthen, children's attractive, female-like facial representation and greater attention toward females' than males' attractiveness. Such differential attention should subsequently influence categorization and person

Parental estimates of their 5- to 6.5-year-olds' experience with others showed that children at this age typically had more interactions with females than males as well [22]. Also, attractiveness continues to be a more salient cue among female than male adult targets. When 4- to 5-year-olds saw faces that varied in attractiveness and sex-stereotypicality (femininity for women; masculinity for men), children more quickly and accurately identified the sex of high attractive than low attractive women. In contrast, attractiveness did not facilitate how quickly or accurately children identified the sex of male faces, whereas masculinity did [43]. These data suggest 4- to 5-year-olds more fluently process high relative to low attractive women as female, but attractiveness does not significantly affect their fluency in classifying men as male. Such processing fluency is important because when adults easily process or classify an object, they briefly experience positive affect [17, 44]. Adults' processing fluency is also linked to positive evaluations of individuals [45]. If children also experience positive affect due to ease in processing, the fluency with which children process attractive female faces should affect their evaluations and information processing more so for attractive females than for attractive males. Indeed, such data are evident in studies looking at their

perception during early childhood.

attractiveness biases and recognition memory.

**3. Early childhood**

130 Perception of Beauty

Additionally, the effect sizes for children's positive attribution biases were substantially higher when directed at female relative to male peers (1.57 vs. 0.80 in the forced choice condition and 1.18 vs. 0.47 in the non-forced choice condition). A similar discrepancy was found in the effect sizes for children's negative attribution biases when directed at female versus male peers (1.69 vs. 1.05 in the forced choice condition and 1.19 vs. 0.35 in the non-forced choice condition) [46]. Thus, attractiveness influenced children's attributions for both female and male peers, which is similar to other research showing attribution scores did not significantly differ based on sex of stimulus [48]. The larger effect sizes based on female attractiveness, however, suggest attractiveness has more practical and social significance for female than male targets.

Indeed, attractiveness significantly influenced how 3- to 7-year-olds processed information about female, but not male, adult and child characters when hearing stories in which two characters' actions and appearance were either consistent or inconsistent with the "beauty is good" stereotype [49]. For example, children heard stories in which one character displayed positive attributes (liked, friendly, smart, or prosocial) and the other character displayed negative attributes (disliked, unfriendly, not smart, or aggressive). In stereotype-consistent versions, an attractive character displayed the positive attributes and an unattractive character displayed the negative attributes. For stereotype-inconsistent versions, it was the reverse. After hearing the story and seeing a picture depicting the characters displaying their attributes, the experimenter showed children facial images of the two characters and asked children to identify the person who displayed the positive attribute. Children made significantly more errors on this question when the story was stereotype-inconsistent than stereotypeconsistent, but only when the characters were female. Their performance on this question for stereotype-consistent and stereotype-inconsistent stories was relatively similar when the characters were male. Importantly, children accurately recalled other story details, indicating they were attending to the story. Despite allocating appropriate attention to the story, children made almost twice as many errors identifying female characters when the story was stereotype-inconsistent vs. stereotype-consistent—they erred in choosing the attractive female character as the one possessing the positive attributes when it was actually the unattractive female character. Thus, young children are more likely to process information to be consistent with the "beauty is good" stereotype when observing females, but not necessarily males [49].

Young children's schemata for the "beauty is good" stereotype (i.e., cognitive structures that include knowledge of the stereotypes, beliefs, and expectations regarding a given group) might include the belief that attractiveness is more important for females than males. If such a belief is readily accessible, it could explain why attractiveness more significantly influenced their identification of female than male characters [49]. Children do seem to believe that appearance is more important for girls than boys. To learn about gender stereotypes that children spontaneously produced, an experimenter prompted pre-schoolers, kindergartners, first graders, and fourth and fifth graders to, "Tell me what you know about girls/boys. Describe them." Children's most frequent first response to this question related to statements regarding appearance (e.g., being pretty) when discussing girls and to traits (e.g., plays rough) when discussing boys. Overall, children made more appearance-based comments about girls compared with comments regarding traits and activities, whereas they made more trait and activity-based comments about boys compared with comments regarding appearance. These results demonstrate that children's appearance-based stereotypes are more readily accessible when thinking about girls than when thinking about boys [8]. Children's greater emphasis on the importance of females' appearance is evident in other studies as well—first graders' ratings of other children's cuteness decreased when the targets wore glasses, but the decrease was much greater for girl than boy targets [50].

During early childhood, children show stronger biases based on female peers' than male peers' attractiveness. They also are more likely to process information about female than male targets to be consistent with the "beauty is good" stereotype. Finally, they are more likely to naturally produce comments related to appearance when discussing girls relative to boys. It is plausible that having a facial representation that is still predominantly weighted toward female and attractive results in their attending to females' appearance more so than males' appearance and subsequently displaying these disparate behaviours in relation to female and male targets. Faces similar to this representation should be most easily processed, and ease in processing is related to experiencing positive affect [17, 44]. In addition to this proposed automatic affective processing of attractive female faces, children also likely learn that females' attractiveness is valued from peers, parents, television, and fairy tales [51–55]. Both this implicit processing and explicit knowledge could explain the differences found in the studies discussed.
