Without further ado, here are the most attractive facial traits a person can possess — ahem , scientifically speaking. If anyone has ever come up to you and used the pickup line, "Hey, you look familiar. Do I know you from somewhere? And, truth be told, that might be why the person is hitting on you.
An article for the Association for Psychological Science revealed that "familiar faces are easy to process and categorize.
This was proved to be the case through a study conducted by psychological scientist Jamin Halberstadt in which participants rated local celebrities as more attractive than morphed or averaged photos of different celebrity facial features.
Familiarity may sound a bit boring on paper, but our brains have convinced us that familiar faces are actually attractive. If someone were to tell you that you're average-looking, you probably wouldn't be jumping up and down with joy.
However, the study conducted by psychological scientist Jamin Halberstadt not only found that people prefer familiar faces, but they also prefer average faces. In this sense, an average face is a blend of different facial features — a face that has been "averaged" together. Using pictures of national celebrities, Halberstadt digitally blended them together with faces of the same gender and nationality.
By the end of the study, the participants had consistently rated the morphed images as more attractive with the exception of local celebrity faces. Averageness may have an edge up on familiarity when it comes to attractiveness, but you can't discount that humans like what they already know — especially when it comes to faces.
And whose faces do you know better than your own family's? Yes, this is where it gets a little weird, folks. In , a study consisting of three separate experiments confirmed that people are attracted to others who either resemble themselves or their parents, or, as the study put it, "people find individuals who resemble their kin more sexually appealing. However, it's important to note that this is on a subconscious, subliminal level. The participants were very much not attracted to their family members' faces once they became aware of their genetic connection.
So, maybe more like Jon Snow and Daenrys Targaryen? Game of Thrones characters aside, an earlier study also found that people are attracted to others who resemble their opposite-sex parent. Complex and cringey. Having a youthful-looking face — a babyface, as it were — is desirable. One study found that men rated baby-like features including "large eyes, small nose, and small chin" as most attractive.
Caroline Keating, an expert in non-verbal communication at Colgate University in New York, told BBC Future , "The big eyes, the long lashes, the arched brows, the plump lips, the small chins, the round face, the cute little nose — if I wasn't describing a baby, I'd be describing a supermodel. Although how a person acts and how a person looks are two very different things, people tend to consider those with babyfaces to have childlike characteristics, including innocence, according to Keating.
Simple faces are not only easier for our brains to compute, but they are also what men find most attractive, according to one study. It's sparse, it's plain. Her study suggest that evolution has made us experts on faces. Previous research has shown a high level of agreement between people when it comes to evaluationg facial attractiveness. In the current study, the scientists let participants view images of faces pre-rated as most, intermediate, or less attractive.
This was done after participants received a small dose of morphin, a drug that stimulates the reward system. They also spent more time looking at the eyes of the people in the pictures. The researchers saw no effect from the drugs when participants viewed images of intermediate or less attractive faces. Is it possible that the human brain has evolved to reinforce behaviors that are evolutionary favourable for us as a species? It very well could have, according to the scientists. Similarly, there are many factors that contribute to a good relationship much more than facial attractiveness.
High levels of sex hormones during puberty actually suppress the immune system, raising vulnerability to disease and infection. It sounds like a bad thing. In other words it signifies a more robust constitution.
No two faces are alike, and no two halves of a face are alike. Countless small variables make faces somewhat asymmetrical — a slightly wider jaw on one side, one eye a fraction of an inch lower than the other, a cheekbone that sticks out just a wee bit more, a dimple on one cheek, etc. In a beautiful face, we are really seeing the artistry of good genes. It may be that symmetry covaries with other desirable characteristics that reflect the same genetic endowment and overall health Penton-Voak et al.
Less obvious is that a pretty or handsome face is also generally one that is, well, average. When presented with individual faces and a composite of those individual faces, participants will judge the composite as more attractive than the individual, more distinctive faces.
The most attractive faces appear to be those whose features are closest to the average in the population—that is, more prototypical. Averageness, like symmetry, reflects a favorable genetic endowment. Those with average features are less likely to be carrying harmful mutations. Additionally, averageness reflects greater heterozygosity — having both a dominant and a recessive allele for given traits, rather than two dominant or two recessive alleles an advantage that symmetry also reflects.
Heterozygosity confers relatively greater resistance to pathogens, in many cases, and thus, along with all the other indicators of resilience, we may be programmed to seek it out through its subtle but telltale signs.
However, it has also been argued that there may be some much simpler cognitive reasons for the preference for averages. Prototypes are more familiar-looking than less typical examples of a given class of objects, be it the face of a potential mate or the face of a timepiece, and they are easier to process. In the Sex of the Beholder. Males may place greater importance on physical beauty when it comes to mate choice, while females also attend to characteristics like power and status.
But a number of factors contribute to how much — and when — male face characteristics matter to women. But this preference wanes during other times of the month. Again, evolutionary psychology provides a ready explanation. Humans, like many other species, are socially monogamous but not necessarily sexually monogamous. But good genes in the sense of physical health is not the same as good genes in the sense of character, and what makes a good sperm donor may not make the best long-term, nurturing, helpful life partner.
The flip side of high testosterone is an increased tendency toward aggression and antisocial behavior, a tendency to compete rather than help. The reason-unseating effect of a beautiful face partly involves the amygdala. Activation of the amygdala, which detects the value of social stimuli, has been associated with greater discounting of all kinds of future rewards, and sure enough, this brain area shows much stronger activation to attractive faces than to more ho-hum ones.
In both men and women, attractive faces cause greater activation in several other brain areas involved in processing of rewards.
These include the nucleus accumbens, which also activates in response to rewarding stimuli like money; the medial prefrontal cortex; and the anterior cingulate cortex, which may be involved in shaping future behavior from learning reward outcomes. Beauty is unfair. Not everyone can be born with great genes. Not everyone can be born symmetrical.
Not everyone can be born enticingly, well, average. But obviously there are many factors contributing to attractiveness that are potentially under our control.
For women, makeup does have a strong effect. In one study, women wearing makeup were approached more, and approached faster, by men at a bar than they were on nights without makeup Gueguen, b.
Effect sizes on beauty judgments for makeup have been found to be as high as those for the facial structural features mentioned earlier Osborn, Getting enough beauty sleep is something everyone can do to up their beauty quotient.
Not surprisingly, individuals who were sleep deprived were rated significantly less attractive than those who were rested. Average faces. Reformed facial shapes. Characteristics of beautiful faces. Beautiful figure. Virtual attractiveness. Virtual Miss Germany.
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