Have you ever wondered why you find some people attractive while others are not? Do you think that appearance is purely a superficial trait? In a Discovery Channel documentary, “The Science of Sex Appeal”, several research groups discuss the signals we as humans give out and even interpret without even consciously knowing. Interestingly enough these characteristics, likely other animal characteristics, have been selected for as we evolved.
In general, when you see a beautiful woman people, no matter the culture, can agree on their attractiveness. Why is that? The researchers studied what people found attractive between a variety of cultures and even throughout history and found the uniting rule. The rule is the golden ratio of two thirds, which indicated that body parts such as arm length compared to leg length should be as close to two thirds ratio as possible. In facial beauty the most important characteristics are eye width to eye seperation and nose to mouth ratio. An interesting method used to confirm this finding was they looked at historically idolized beauties (male and female) and found that they scored high as expected.
Another factor that makes an individual beautiful is facial symmetry. As a fetus we develop along an axis, therefore low symmetry indicates that during development an individual had poor nutrition, genetic abnormalities and/or mild infections. All of these factors change facial design. Evolutionarily it makes sense how this system of determining beauty arose because those with better genes and fetal health will product better offspring and thus are better mates. Another really interesting fact about facial beauty is that it changes from day to day. In females during their ovulation period they appear more beautiful (see link to view examples). During ovulation (when female is most fertile), her voice also increases which has been shown to be more attractive. Now I had always thought, due to media, that a low voice in females was thought to be sexier. But through several studies they found that men rated the higher pitch voices of females better than low pitch voices.
Why? During puberty females get a dose of estrogen and the more estrogen they get the higher their voice and the higher estrogen level has an effect on the rest of their body making them more feminine. A high voice indicates good genes. This finding is also true for males, but a low voice is favored. A really cool example is in an African tribe they found that the lower the man’s voice the more children he tended to have which indicated that this is not a cultural phenomenon.
Though I could go on to tell you about the how a human’s walk defines sexiness, mate selection and much more I will let you look to the video link to learn more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA6nBS-KHEc&feature=related
There are 10 parts on Youtube.
Posted By Caroline Adams (7)
A blog about people! This was very interesting, especially seeing the video and how it breaks down people's faces. The whole 2/3 rule seems to be quite accurate. Although I do think there is an underlying genetic beauty level and I agree that there are some people that are just plain attractive, I still think that there is some amount of preference for people. I know there are some actors/actresses that I will think are absolute perfection in the looks department, but friends of mine do not find anything about them attractive. Did they find anything about certain people having a preference for certain genes?
ReplyDeletePosted by Caitlin Descovich O'Hare
How society classifies beauty! I never knew about the 2/3rds rule or the voice pitch, but after you explained them they seem to make sense. I had heard about the face symmetry things before. I remember reading a study they once did on face symmetry, where they showed test subject two pictures of the same person and asked which they thought was more attractive. The first picture was that of the individual, and the second was half of the same person's face with its mirror image making up the other half of the face, creating a perfectly symmetrical face. I don't remember the statistics, but a majority of thoese asked picked the mirror image face as the more attractive one. Just weird.
ReplyDeletePosted by Austin Gray
I found this blog to be particularly interesting because it depicts what we, as human beings (and of age for potential mate(s) selection), subconsciously analyze on a day to day basis. It has long been believed that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," but the provided video goes to break down the scientific perspective. Beauty is not relative, rather very much biological. It's astonishing how certain features such as facial symmetry and sway of a persons body could indicate the quality of one's genes and fertility. This just goes to show that although we tend to forget, in the end, humans are just another species of animal- one far more sophisticated than all the rest, but animals nonetheless. We tend to choose mates as do more "primitive" species and assess the fitness of our mates primarily on physical attributes. Some people may call it shallow, however, we as biologist understand it is purely the science of life.
ReplyDeleteComment by Jose Mijangos
I heard about this last year, but at that time it was that there was a mathematical equation for beauty. I love that attractiveness is based in the genes of the beholder. Why would we be any different from any other animal? How does this affect our perception of love, however? Who we find most attractive isn't always the person we love. Have they done any studies on the relation between the two? Also, how does this explain significant others who cheat or leave their partner for someone else, but then end up back with that partner in the end? It would be an interesting excuse to the better half- "sorry honey, it's just in my nature." Literally. I would hypothesize that we humans that battle with monogamy versus polygamy may just be having an inner struggle about who best would optimize our reproductive success. I don't know how well society would take these new findings, what with our perception of love as a culture- almost like magic.
ReplyDeletePosted by Chelsea Van Thof
Yeah Caitlin, I actually have not seen anything in all the human research I have read that indicated why we find some individuals more attractive where as other are less attractive. The closest thing I found was that when we are choosing a mate we unconsciously chose an individual with the most different MHC genes from us. Both potential mates would share little genetically making them less susceptible to certain genetic disorders.
ReplyDeleteAs for who we decide to love that involved a entire series of components from personality, income, status etc. There was a study done on mate preference where males who were rated on attractiveness. Then different women were given information he made six figures and his attractiveness increased. This is also biologically based because you want an individual who can support your lifestyle and children (granted six figures more than feeds the family).
Posted By Caroline Adams
I do love how biology can explain many of our decisions. There are many other reasons for why we find certain characteristics in males and females attractive. Quite a bit of work was done by a research Desmond Morris. He looks at human behavior between different cultures and between genders. Really very interesting.
ReplyDeletePosted by Caroline Adams