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Updated: Oct 24, 2025

Assessment of Child Anthropometry in a Large Epidemiologic Study
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Waist-to-Hip Ratio Sensitivity in Early Infancy.

Hannah White1, Alyson Chroust1, Rachel Jubran1

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky.

Infant and Child Development
|August 13, 2021
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Female infants show early sensitivity to the waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), preferring attractive body shapes. This preference, observed in 3.5-month-olds, suggests innate body knowledge development and sex differences in social processing.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental psychology
  • Evolutionary psychology
  • Human behavior

Background:

  • The waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) is a key indicator of health, attractiveness, and age.
  • Adults associate specific WHRs with desirable traits, but developmental origins are unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the developmental emergence of sensitivity to WHR in human infants.
  • To determine if infants exhibit preferences for WHRs associated with adult attractiveness.

Main Methods:

  • Tested 71 3.5-month-old infants (both male and female) using visual stimuli depicting different WHRs.
  • Measured infant looking time preferences between upright and inverted images with varying WHRs.

Main Results:

Keywords:
body processingsex differences in infancysocial developmentwaist-to-hip-ratios

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  • Female infants preferred the WHR (0.7) associated with adult attractiveness over a less attractive WHR (0.9).
  • This preference was evident only for upright stimuli, ruling out low-level visual cues.
  • Male infants did not show a significant WHR preference.

    • Conclusions:

    • Infants possess early sensitivity to WHR, potentially forming a foundation for later social and mate preferences.
    • Findings highlight sex differences in early social information processing and body knowledge development.