Gender Differences in Processing the Appearance of Babies

Time Magazine: Is an Ugly Baby Harder to Love, by Jeffrey Kluger:

Moms might want to hang on to those Mother's Day cards they got last month. There may not be much more familial goodwill forthcoming — at least not after kids get wind of a new study released by Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital and published in the online journal PloS One. Turns out that your mother's feelings for you may not be the unconditional things you always assumed. It's possible, researchers say, that the prettier you were when you were born, the more she loved you.

It's never been a secret that beautiful people get more breaks than everyone else, nor that the bias may start in the nursery. An oft cited — and deeply disturbing — Israeli study once showed that 70% of abused or abandoned children had at least one apparent flaw in their appearance, which otherwise had no impact on their health or educability. McLean psychiatrist Dr. Igor Elman and postdoctoral student Rinah Yamamoto devised a study to explore that phenomenon more closely.

Elman and Yamamoto recruited 27 volunteers — 13 men and 14 women — and sat them at computer screens where they were randomly shown pictures of 50 healthy and attractive babies and 30 others with distinct facial irregularities such as a cleft palate or a skin condition. The volunteers were told that each picture would remain on the screen for four seconds but they could shorten that time by clicking one key or prolong it by clicking another. What the researchers wanted to learn, Elman explains, is how much effort people were willing to exert to look at pictures of pretty babies or avoid pictures of less pretty ones — and, importantly, what that implies.

Research Article is Available on PLoS One

Julie Graves Krishnaswami