Cross-Cultural Agreement in Perceptions of Babyfaced Adults

Abstract

Two studies investigated Korean college students' perceptions of babyfaced adults. The first study replicated McArthur and Apatow's (1983-1984) investigation of U.S. students' impressions of schematic adult male and female faces. The second study replicated Berry and McArthur's (1985) investigation of U.S. students' impressions of 20 young adult Caucasian male faces. The studies revealed near perfect agreement between U.S. and Korean subjects regarding the relative babyfacedness of the stimulus persons as well as very strong agreement regarding their traits. The same facial characteristics that were correlated with U.S. subjects' ratings of babyfacedness were also correlated with Koreans' ratings. In addition, like U.S. subjects, Koreans perceived babyfaced stimulus persons to possess more childlike psychological attributes than their mature-faced counterparts. The results are discussed within a theoretical framework that argues that perceptions of babyfaced adults derive from the specieswide adaptive value of analogous reactions to real babies.

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