Not if you're a man, apparently!

Women can distinguish 'cute' babies

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Scientists believe that they have uncovered the reason why women are more likely to coo more over babies than men - and it is all down to hormones.

Young women were acutely sensitive to a babies' "cuteness", including chubby cheeks, large forehead, big round eyes and button nose, during tests for a new study.

Women who had already gone through the menopause and men generally were less able to distinguish between babies.

Researchers believe that the difference could be the hormones which a woman's body makes during child-bearing years.

Women on the pill, which artificially raises hormone levels, were also more sensitive to variations in how attractive a child looked, the study found.

Psychologists at the University of St Andrews, generated a series of images of the same baby manipulated to appear more or less "cute", by tweaking features generally thought appealing.

The findings showed that the older women who took part in the experiment, who were aged between 53 and 60, struggled to tell the difference between the pictures as much as men did.

"Because average age at menopause is 51 years in Britain, these findings suggest the possible involvement of reproductive hormones in cuteness sensitivity," said Dr Reiner Sprengelmeyer, from the University of St Andrews, who led the study with colleagues from the universities of Bern, Bielefeld and York.

"Given that cuteness is considered an indicator of being young, helpless, and in need of care, we [believe] that the ability to detect small variations in the degree of cuteness may have evolved to guide the allocation of necessary maternal resources to the infant," he added.

The researchers now plan to carry out further research on whether women suffering from post-natal depression are as sensitive to the cuteness of children as other women.





Apparently the ones on the left are cuter.

Buggered if I can tell the difference. I thought they were all the same photo.

-- Edited by ddvmor at 07:47, 2009-01-22