Abstract
Despite considerable evidence indicating that our perceptions of people's psychological attributes are strongly tied to their facial appearance, there has been almost no systematic and theoretically guided research on this topic. The ecological approach to social perception (McArthur & Baron, 1983) holds that facial characteristics may influence impressions if they typically reveal psychological attributes whose detection is important for adaptive functioning. For example, the facial characteristics that identify infants should reveal their helplessness. The ecological approach further predicts that a strong attunement to adaptively significant facial characteristics may be overgeneralized. In particular, it is hypothesized that adults with immature facial qualities are perceived to have childlike psychological attributes. The research we review provides strong support for this prediction. More specifically, adults with various childlike facial qualities are perceived to afford more warmth, more submission, more honesty, less physical strength, and more naivete than those with more mature faces. Implications of the ecological approach for further research on face perception are discussed.