Langlois (1991) Facial Diversity

Aim:

• To replicate previous findings with adult female faces.
• To determine if infant preference extends to male adults, black females and infants.
• Whether attractiveness is culturally determined or innately.

Method:

• Faces were projected on to a screen.
• The child sat on the parent’s lap – 35cm away from the screen.
• Parents wore darkening glasses – prevent any parental preferences.
• Two sets of 16 slides
• 8 blocks of 2 slides in each set.
• 10s trials – presented twice.

Study 1:

60 6-month-old infants – 53 white.

Half attractive, half unattractive faces – neutral expressions, clothing masked.

Results:

• Infants looked longer at attractive faces.
• Preference evident for both male and females – effect was not based on sex.
• No relationships found between mother attractiveness and infant sex and unattractiveness of stimulus face.

Study 2:

40 6-month-old infant – 36 white.

Black adult females’ faces

Results:

• Infants looked longer at attractive black women’s faces.
• No significant relationships were found between maternal attractiveness and attr. of stimulus of faces.

Study 3:

39 6-month-old infants – 36 white.

3-month-old baby faces

Results:

• Infants looked longer at attractive babies’ faces.
• Relationship was not measured – it didn’t show significance in first two studies.

Conclusion:

• Results show that infants can discriminate attractive from unattractive faces, and prefer faces of diverse types.
• Support nature side

Strengths:

 

• Generalizable: the results can be widely generalized to other infants since the study used large samples of children.

• Quantitative data: the data is easier to analyze and understand. Also, it erases researcher subjectivity as the information does not need to be interpreted. Therefore, the results are likely to have higher reliability.

 

Weaknesses:

• Culturally biased: even though the sample was randomly selected, most of the infants were white, which may not generalize to infants of other cultures. Furthermore, the slides only showed black female faces and no comparisons were made for male black faces.
• Low ecological validity: the situation was unrealistic because infants do not experience attractiveness under controlled conditions, therefore the experiment lacks mundane realism, which may lower the reliability of results.
• Extraneous variables: other variables may have come into play since the researcher only rated the mother’s attractiveness because children are exposed to other individuals. Therefore, the data may have been affected by these.