ASSESSING THE CUTENESS OF CHILDREN: SIGNIFICANT FACTORS AND GENDER DIFFERENCES

Social Behavior and Personality, 2006 by Koyama, Reiko, Takahashi, Yuwen, Mori, Kazuo

A newly developed questionnaire revealed that there are four factors in adults' perception of children's cuteness: childlike behavior, children's imitation of adults, adults' protective feeling toward children, and children's physical attributes. Eighty-four childless undergraduates and 72 adults with at least one child watched a film of a five-year-old boy and girl dressed either in boyish clothes or girlish, and then assessed their cuteness using the questionnaire. The results showed that participants rated equally their feeling of children's cuteness regardless of having or not having their own children. Among the four factors of cuteness, childlike behavior seemed to operate most strongly.

Keywords: assessment of cuteness, factors of cuteness, Japanese children, five-year-olds, gender.

In social psychology, many studies have been done on the effect of children's physical attractiveness on adults. There seems to be a certain supported tendency for adults to evaluate attractive children more favorably than unattractive children. Clifford and Walster (1973) asked male and female teachers to make several predictions about a child after viewing the child's progress report with an attached photograph of an attractive or an unattractive child. They gave higher ratings on ability measures to more attractive children than to less attractive ones. Felson (1980) found that teachers attributed more intelligence to physically attractive children. Adams and Cohen (1975,1976) and Adams (1978) also showed that teachers expected physically attractive children to be more academically successful and socially responsive. Further, attractive children were less likely to receive punishment for incorrect responses on learning tasks than were unattractive ones (Dion, 1972, 1974). Conversely, physically unattractive children were predicted to have the possibility of placement in special classes for educable mentally retarded students, lower levels of functioning, future difficulties in peer relationships, and future academic difficulty (Ross & Salvia, 1975). In addition to different expectations from adults between attractive and unattractive children, there are sex differences in adults' expectations or treatment of children. Kehle, Bramble, and Mason (1974) revealed that attractive female students were rated higher on the quality of their essays than were unattractive females, while just the reverse was true for teachers' ratings for males. Sadker and Sadker (1972) indicated that elementary school boys received more active attention from their teachers, in the form of disapproval and general interaction, than did girls. It was also suggested that boys are consistently given lower grades than are girls (McCandless, 1970; Maccoby, 1966) and that teachers were more critical and negative towards boys (Brophy & Good, 1970; Sears & Feldman, 1966).

If physical attractiveness was the only factor in child-adult relationships, unattractive children (especially unattractive boys) would suffer discriminatory treatment from adults. In regard to this, Adams and Lavoie (1975) suggested that when another factor was added to adults' evaluation criteria for children, the additional factor was more influential than physical attractiveness. For example, Leinbach and Fagot (1991) concluded that when the relationship between adults and children was close, the children's physical attractiveness had no influence. When adults interact with children, it is not only on the level of evaluation. Rather, since adults have the duty of child rearing, they feel emotions toward children. For example, Klaus and Kennell (1976/1982) suggested the existence of bonding. Klaus and Kennell defined bonding as a specific and enduring emotional tie that a parent forms with his or her newborn infant. In addition, Bowlby (1969) investigated the existence of attachment in the mother-infant and parent-infant relationship. According to Bowlby, attachment refers to the emotional bond that an infant forms with its primary caregiver. Many factors affect attachment behavior. Children's cuteness can be theorized to be one of them. It is also suggested that adults develop a special feeling for children when they have their own.

Being perceived as cute can help elicit adult attention and caretaking behavior (Hildebrandt & Fitzgerald, 1978, 1981, 1983; Robson & Moss, 1970). Children's body proportions, facial features and facial expressions were found to be factors of perceived cuteness. Concerning children's body proportions, Alley (1983) found that age-related changes in body shape could alter perceived cuteness, and the body proportions typical of 2- to 12-year-olds were the cutest. Related to the children's facial features, Lorenz (1943) showed that infants whose appearance was more babyish (high forehead, large eyes, large cheeks, small nose, mouth, and ears) received more positive assessments of cuteness from adults. Concerning children's facial expressions, Power, Hildebrandt, and Fitzgerald (1982) found that smiling infants were perceived as more cute than crying infants. However, only physical characteristics have been dealt with in studies about children's cuteness. Koyama and Mori (2002) pointed out that there might be another factor in children's perceived cuteness and that, in spite of whether or not they have children, adults instinctively have a certain tendency toward protecting children which is evoked by children's fragility. Furthermore, Koyama and Mori predicted that adults perceived such feeling as part of children's cuteness.