title: Adults with siblings like children's faces more than those without.
abstract: Humans cross-culturally find infant faces both cute and highly likeable. Their so-called "baby schema" features have clear adaptive value by likely serving as an innate releasing mechanism that elicits caretaking behaviors from adults. However, we do not know whether experience with young children during social development might act to further facilitate this. Here we investigated the potential impact of having siblings on adult likeability judgments of children's faces. In this study, 73 adult men and women (40 with siblings and 33 without) were shown 148 different face pictures of young children (1 month to 6.5 years) and judged them for likeability. Results showed that both groups found faces of infants (<7 months) as equally likeable. However, for faces more than 7 months of age, whereas the no-sibling group showed a reduced liking for faces with increasing age, the sibling group found faces of all ages as equally likeable. Furthermore, for adults with siblings, the closer in age they were to their siblings, the stronger their likeability was for young children's faces. Our results are the first to show that having siblings can extend the influence of baby schema to children as well as infants.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory for Neuro-Information of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 610054, China.
authors.forename: Lizhu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Luo
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory for Neuro-Information of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 610054, China.
authors.forename: Keith M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Kendrick
authors.affiliation: Research Center for Brain Function and Psychological Science, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China. Electronic address: lihongwrm@vip.sina.com.
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5R 2X2, Canada; School of Education, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua 321004, China. Electronic address: kang.lee@utoronto.ca.
authors.forename: Kang
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lee
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D001290:Attitude; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D035781:Siblings / Q000523:psychology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Baby schema; Children’s faces; Infant faces; Likeability; Rearing experience; Siblings