**4. Middle childhood**

There is evidence to suggest that attractiveness might become a more salient cue for male targets starting around 7–8 years of age. In the study examining 3- to 11-year-olds' attractiveness biases, children's biases based on boys' attractiveness significantly correlated with age—they showed an increase in their assignment of positive attributes to high attractive boys and negative attributes to low attractive boys with age. Although a similar increase was also seen in their biases based on girls' attractiveness, only the correlations between age and children's biases based on boys' attractiveness were significant [46].

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

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

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.

There is evidence to suggest that attractiveness might become a more salient cue for male targets starting around 7–8 years of age. In the study examining 3- to 11-year-olds' attractiveness biases, children's biases based on boys' attractiveness significantly correlated with age—they showed an increase in their assignment of positive attributes to high attractive boys and negative

males [49].

132 Perception of Beauty

was much greater for girl than boy targets [50].

**4. Middle childhood**

Older children's increase in attention toward boys' attractiveness might be due to children's facial representations becoming more differentiated between 5 and 8 years of age. More specifically, 5-year-olds do not appear to have separate facial representations for female and male adult faces (or child and adult faces, or faces from different racial groups) [56]. By 8 years of age, however, there is evidence to suggest children's facial representations are becoming more differentiated and that they have separate facial representations based on race (and possibly based on sex and age) [57]. In other words, the early emerging attractive, female-like facial representation infants and young children have for human faces gradually becomes more differentiated with development. By 8 years of age, children might have separate rudimentary representations for female and male faces [46, 56] that are presumably attractive [12] and guiding processing of female and male targets' facial attractiveness (**Figure 3**). Such a transition would explain why increases in age correlated with significant increases in children's attractiveness biases for male peers. It could also explain why there were slight, albeit not significant, increases in children's attractiveness biases for female peers—they are now developing an average representation for female faces as opposed to having a female-like facial representation for human faces [46].

**Figure 3.** A depiction of the potential transition from a weighted female-like facial representation to separate representations for female and male faces. Note that the literature suggests that although differentiated representations begin to form during early childhood, it takes several years for these representations to fully form and become adult-like.

There is other evidence to suggest that facial representations become more differentiated with age and affect preferences for averageness. Like the infant studies described earlier [30, 31], 5-year-olds, 9-year olds, and adults viewed pairs of faces that included two images of the same person—one image was morphed to be 50% closer to the group average (*more average* face) and the other was morphed to be 50% away from the group average (*less average* face) [58]. Participants indicated which face was more attractive. Unlike the infants, all three age groups showed a significant preference for *more average* faces, with the effect becoming stronger with age—adults more often chose *more average* faces than 9-year-olds and 9-year-olds more often chose *more average* faces than 5-year-olds. These findings support the idea of development and refinement of separate representations for male and female faces with age. Results also revealed that participants more often selected *more average* adult female faces than *more average* adult male faces, but that target sex difference was not consistently observed for 5-year-old and 9-year-old target faces [58]. This discrepancy might have occurred because children are in the process of forming more distinct representations for female and male faces and for adult and child faces [56, 57]. Given early predominant experience with adult females for most children [18–22], the adult female face category average should be more established than the adult male face category average or child categories and thus most greatly influence averageness preferences for adult female faces.

The developmental change in children's facial representations might also explain why only 8-year-olds, and not 5- to 7-year-olds, could accurately judge the physical attractiveness of older aged, post-pubertal males (i.e., 17-year-olds) [59]. It might be necessary for children to develop separate facial representations for pre-pubertal and post-pubertal males for them to more accurately judge older males' attractiveness. Pre-pubertal girls' and boys' faces are relatively similar looking to one another and are more similar looking to adult female faces than adult male faces. Post-pubertal males' faces, however, are quite differentiated from adult females' faces due to males' development of secondary sex characteristics [60]. Subsequently, it is more difficult for both 7- to 10-year-olds and adults to classify the sex of pre-pubertal faces compared with adult faces, especially when only internal facial features are available to make the judgement [61]. Starting around 8 years of age, therefore, children's more differentiated facial representations should start to more strongly impact their attractiveness judgments and biases for male targets. Given the greater saliency of females than males' attractiveness in the years prior, however, and the likelihood that separate representations for female faces are established earlier in development than separate representations for male faces, attractiveness might continue to have a stronger influence on perceptions and processing when observing female relative to male targets. For example, 12-year-olds and undergraduate students rated the musical performance of 6th grade pianists more positively when they also perceived that person as attractive, but this effect was limited to female pianists only [62].

Perhaps not surprisingly, girls seem to understand the concept of attractiveness and its importance for their gender earlier in development than boys. For example, when 3- to 6.5-year-olds were asked what it means to be pretty or cute, the oldest aged girls provided the most detailed descriptions [48]. Similarly, when 3- to 11-year-olds were asked to sort and label pictures of peers based on attractiveness, girls were significantly more accurate at this task than boys [63]. In the study where children spontaneously produced information about girls and boys, the appearance-based comments about girls increased with age, particularly for girl participants almost half of the statements 4th and 5th grade girls made about girls related to appearance [8]. It, therefore, appears that the greater saliency and importance of attractiveness for females than males become internalized by girls early in development and this conceptual knowledge increases with development. Such beliefs might get reinforced via television shows aimed at school age children and teenagers by having female characters mention beauty or attractiveness in nearly every episode [64].
