What Do Parents' Childhood Photographs Tell Us About Patterns of Familial Resemblance?

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2012
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Haverford College. Department of Psychology
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
Two competing hypotheses concerning paternal resemblance exist. The first states that children may have evolved to resemble their fathers in order to mitigate paternity uncertainty and elicit paternal investment. The second states that children may have evolved to conceal resemblance to their fathers because it may be unsafe to resemble one's father if the domestic father is not the genetic father. In the current study 80 raters matched photographs of one-year old children to childhood photographs of the children's fathers and mothers, rated the degree of resemblance between children and their parents as adults, and indicated whether children looked more like their fathers or mothers. The results suggest that children resemble their mothers more than their fathers, supporting the concealment hypothesis. It was also found that boys more closely resemble their parents than girls do and that daughters and fathers resemble each other less than other parent-child pairs do.
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