Golden Ratio Attractiveness

In people’s perspective, attractiveness possess a wide variety of positive personal qualities compared to unattractive people. Result from the study on physical attractiveness stereotypes show the attractive people had the most positive ratings. For example, they are judged as less disturbed, rated as happier and more successful, and more likely to be hired after a job interview. Thus, the concept of attractiveness having a correlation between an individual’s physical appearance and his/her achievements, abilities, psychological well-being and/or other status characteristics to create a perception is

In a study carried out by Byrne (1971) found that strangers with similar attitudes to participants were rated as being more physically attractive in comparison to participants which had dissimilar attitudes.

In another study, Langlois and Roggaman (1990) took photos of faces and morphed them together to produce composite images made up of 4, 8, 16 or 32 images. Participants rated faces as increasingly attractive the more faces that went into each image; this applied to both male and female faces. The more faces in an image, the more symmetrical they become, it seems that moving a facial image closer to the average increases its perceived attractiveness. It is likely that symmetry equates to fitness and “good genes”, these people are less likely to have been affected by harmful mutation. People with attractive faces are preferred because of the benefits of passing on these attractive characteristics to offspring. Little & Hancock propose that humans have evolved to be attracted to symmetrical faces because they indicate “averageness”, which equates to genetic health. Grammar and Thornhill (1994) found that females are attracted to males with masculine characteristics, for example: large jaw and prominent cheekbones. These features arise as a result of testosterone, which is also a handicap because it suppresses the immune system. Therefore, showing only “healthy” individuals can afford to produce these traits- advertising a strong immune system. Cartwright (2000) supported this, finding men prefer photographs of women with symmetrical faces and vice versa.

This article argues that physical attractiveness is a gateway for a healthy relationship. Singles, of both sex, recognizes the importance of physical attractiveness, especially online. Only when the standard is meet would they investigate further into the personality. It also argues that excessive attractiveness is unnecessary, and people prefers “averagely” attractive partner. The author is a dating & mating psychologist, has deep study in relationships. I will use this article as a major point to support my thesis statement.

The studies I participated in were from FaceResearch.org. The description of this website was, ‘Participate in short, frequently updated experiments about the traits people find attractive in faces and voices, find out how you compare to others, and learn more about the psychology of attractiveness.’ I was very interested in this section in class, so I decided to do a few studies from this website. The first was one titled Facial Attractiveness, and I clicked on it because it had the most participants (over 77,000). In this experiment, participants were supposed to indicate which face was more attractive (and how much we prefer it) of the two shown. The participants could click on the following options: much more attractive, more attractive, somewhat more attractive, or slightly more attractive. There were abut forty sets of faces. They would show two female faces, one more feminized and one more masculinized. Then, they would show two males faces. In the end, the results were as follows: ‘On average, people preferred the more feminine women 80% of the time and the more feminine men 54% of the time. You preferred feminine women 100% of the time and feminine men 0% of the time.’ I also participated in the study What makes a face attractive? It was similar to the other study in which I was given two faces and had to choose which one was more attractive. The results were as follows: ‘On average, people had a 58% preference strength for the more feminine images. You had a 46%

Previous researchers have concentrated on the effect of smiling on physical attractiveness. Reis, et al., (2010) conducted a research by using 15 males and 15 females neutral and smiling photos of each subject that served as a stimulus to 50 females and 50 males college students. Participants rated each photograph on 20 traits adjectives. An analysis of variance showed that people rated smiling profiles as more favorable than non-smiling profiles. Moreover,

If individual faces are composed in one face to create a brand new face, then regular people will indeed find them to be more attractive than the individual faces.

The experiments design was conducted well. Since the experimenters chose all Caucasian newborn infants, it was a good idea to use Caucasian faces because that is a face they are most used to. Also, it was a good idea to use female faces instead of males faces because the newborn infant spend months in their mothers stomach and have a connection with females since the females are the parents who care for the newborn infants the most and are more likely to stay at home with them. For example, females breast feeding newborn infants and staying at home with the newborn infant longer after their maternity leave is over. Once it was known that attractive faces are preferred over unattractive faces, seeing if the orientation of the face changes the looking time is important.

Within today’s multimedia society especially the evaluation of faces is of outstanding importance. An attractive face clearly finds more approval: a beautiful face activates the reward centre in the opposite’s brain and we generally link positive human characteristics with an attractive face (Rhodes, 2006). Systematic research in this area started at the beginning of the 1970’s. Dion, Berscheid and Walster, who were pioneers in this field, determined the relationship between positive characteristics and attractive faces and came up with the proposal ‘"what is beautiful is good" (Dion, Berscheid, Walster; 1972).

The main goal in conducting the experiment of how attractiveness would vary based off of western and non-western faces was to see if race would make a difference in how a class of western dominant students perceived attractiveness. We hypothesized that since our participants were western dominant, the western faces would be rated higher than those of the non-western faces (consistent with Burke, Nolan, Hayward, Russell & Sulikowski, 2013; Todorov, 2012). The critical question that we would be trying to answer was whether or not race would matter in determining how attractive an individual is perceived to be. We went with the hypothesis of the western faces being voted more attractive was because in previous studies race was linked to how one would vote attractiveness of another individual. In addition, we also believed that since the participants of the experiment were primarily

The survey had four images shown at a time. All images had the same WHR but different skin tones. The participants were asked to rate each image on a seven-point Likert scale (negative three being least attractive to positive three being most attractive) utilized by Brooks et al. (2015). This process was repeated for all four WHR from 0.7, 0.8, 0.9 and 1.0.

There have been many attempts to validate our current beauty standards. For example, critics have argued that while there has been research showing the negative effects, “there are also studies that found no effect or even positive effects of these media portrayals on young women” (Arendt, et al 2). Also, while many people accuse beauty of being arbitrary, it is simply not the case. As F. Nahai states in his article "Evolutionary Beauty", “The quest to define standards of beauty is not new. One of the earliest to seek insight into the elusive qualities of beauty was the Greek philosopher Pythagoras. He believed that beauty was intertwined with static

A facial attractiveness research stated that women with beautiful face have high communication mobility because beautiful face be valued superior, so they can accept by the social circle easily.

Biologists believed that facial symmetry should be attractive because it may signal mate quality. Rhodes, Proffit, Grady and Sumich (1998) manipulated the symmetry to figure out the effect on attractiveness. 4 versions of a picture were created. One was perfectly symmetric, the others were a highly symmetric version, normal level of symmetry and a low symmetric version.64 subjects rated these faces. The results clearly stated that perfect symmetry was significantly more attractive and low symmetry faces were unattractive, more over the males found the perfect symmetric faces more appealing as potential life partners, so facial symmetry does play a role in mate selection. In the second experiment the authors compared the attractiveness of faces at three symmetry levels. These were normal, high and perfect. The subjects were shown two versions of the same face at different

Jones, W., Hansson, R., & Phillips, A. (1978). Physical attractiveness and judgments of psychopathology. The Journal of Social Psychology, 105, 79-84.