Romantic and maternal love are highly rewarding experiences. Both are linked to the perpetuation of the species and therefore have a closely linked biological function of crucial evolutionary importance. The newly developed ability to study the neural correlates of subjective mental states with brain imaging techniques has allowed neurobiologists to learn something about the neural bases of both romantic and maternal love. Both types of attachment activate regions specific to each, as well as overlapping regions in the brain's reward system that coincide with areas rich in oxytocin and vasopressin receptors. Both deactivate a common set of regions associated with negative emotions, social judgment and 'mentalizing' that is, the assessment of other people's intentions and emotions. Human attachment seems therefore to employ a push-pull mechanism that overcomes social distance by deactivating networks used for critical social assessment and negative emotions, while it bonds individuals through the involvement of the reward circuitry, explaining the power of love to motivate and exhilarate. Yet the biological study of love, and especially romantic love, must go beyond and look for biological insights that can be derived from studying the world literature of love, and thus bring the output of the humanities into its orbit. (+info)
Do men hold African-American and Caucasian women to different standards of beauty?
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Racial differences in men's preferences for African-American and Caucasian women's body size and shape were examined. As expected, there was a trend for African-American men to choose ideal figures with a lower waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), which is associated with a more curvaceous figure. Contrary to expectations, however, African-American men did not choose heavier female figures as ideal. In fact, both groups chose underweight and normal weight figures as ideal. The results from this study suggest that while preferences for WHR may continue to be associated with cultural factors, African-American and Caucasian men may have become more similar than different in their preferences for female weight. Also, the results suggest that within the African-American sample, there were two subsamples with regard to WHR preferences, with one subgroup endorsing the same ideal WHR as their Caucasian counterparts. The results are discussed in terms of possible changes to cultural values that may be reflected in a change in what is considered attractive. (+info)
Common HLA alleles associated with health, but not with facial attractiveness.
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Three adaptive hypotheses have been proposed to explain the link between the human leucocyte antigen (hla) genes, health measures and facial attractiveness: inbreeding avoidance, heterozygote advantage and frequency-dependent selection. This paper reports findings that support a new hypothesis relating HLA to health. We suggest a new method to quantify the level of heterozygosity. HLA heterozygosity did not significantly predict health measures in women, but allele frequency did. Women with more common HLA alleles reported fewer cold and flu bouts per year, fewer illnesses in the previous year and rated themselves healthier than women with rare alleles. To our knowledge, this is the first study to show a positive correlation between HLA allele frequency and general health measures. We propose that certain common HLA alleles confer resistance to prevalent pathogens. Nevertheless, neither HLA heterozygosity nor allele frequency significantly predicted how healthy or attractive men rated the female volunteers. Three non-mutually exclusive explanations are put forward to explain this finding. (+info)
Q-cgi: new techniques to assess variation in perception applied to facial attractiveness.
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We present novel methods for assessing variation in the perception of subjective cues based on a fusion of Q-methodology with computer graphics techniques. Participants first Q-sort face stimuli based upon a subjective quality; a randomization-based statistic is then calculated to test whether groups of participants differ in their perception. Computer graphics are then used to extract and illustrate the differences in the manner which participants sorted so that the differences can be quantified. As a demonstration, the technique is applied to investigate the effects of prospective relationship duration and of sexual restrictiveness on the characteristics which participants find attractive in photographs of opposite-sex faces. Results show that in a naturally varying set of faces, female participants prefer facial cues related to masculinity for short-term relationships, whereas characteristics related to positive personality attributes are preferred for long-term relationships. For short-term relationships, male participants appear to prefer more feminine, youthful faces. Preferences of individuals with less restricted sexual strategy paralleled short-term preferences in that more feminine female faces and more masculine male faces were preferred. (+info)
Evidence for adaptive design in human gaze preference.
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Many studies have investigated the physical cues that influence face preferences. By contrast, relatively few studies have investigated the effects of facial cues to the direction and valence of others' social interest (i.e. gaze direction and facial expressions) on face preferences. Here we found that participants demonstrated stronger preferences for direct gaze when judging the attractiveness of happy faces than that of disgusted faces, and that this effect of expression on the strength of attraction to direct gaze was particularly pronounced for judgements of opposite-sex faces (study 1). By contrast, no such opposite-sex bias in preferences for direct gaze was observed when participants judged the same faces for likeability (study 2). Collectively, these findings for a context-sensitive opposite-sex bias in preferences for perceiver-directed smiles, but not perceiver-directed disgust, suggest gaze preference functions, at least in part, to facilitate efficient allocation of mating effort, and evince adaptive design in the perceptual mechanisms that underpin face preferences. (+info)
The Philadelphia Face Perception Battery.
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The Philadelphia Face Perception Battery (PFPB) tests four aspects of face perception: discrimination of facial similarity, attractiveness, gender, and age. Calibration with 116 neurologically intact subjects yielded average performance of approximately 90%. Across subjects, there was a low correlation (<0.22) in performance between the tests (with the exception of the attractiveness and age discrimination tests) suggesting that the tests measure independent aspects of face perception. There were modest effects of subject demographic factors upon performance, and test-retest reliability scores (between 0.37 and 0.75) were comparable to other neuropsychological batteries. Modification of the stimuli to obscure internal facial features lowered performance on the age, gender, and attractiveness discrimination tests between 2 and 4 standard deviations. The clinical sensitivity of the battery was demonstrated by testing a patient with acquired prosopagnosia. She showed performance impairments of between 2 and 4 standard deviations on all sub-tests. The PFPB is freely available for non-commercial use. (+info)
Assessing body image in patients with systemic sclerosis (scleroderma): validation of the adapted Satisfaction with Appearance Scale.
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People with scleroderma often experience disfiguring appearance-related changes in socially visible and interpersonally salient areas. Although disfigurement can lead to body image dissatisfaction, this phenomenon has not been well investigated due to the lack of a disfigurement-specific measure. The Satisfaction With Appearance (SWAP) scale, previously developed in burn survivors, was adapted and administered to 254 participants with scleroderma to evaluate its psychometric integrity and its validity for use in a different medical population that experiences changes in appearance. Principal component analysis revealed two factors - Subjective Dissatisfaction and Perceived Social Impact - rather than the four found in burn victims. Excellent estimates of internal consistency and temporal stability and strong evidence for the reliability of the two-factor solution were found. The resulting factor structure in a scleroderma population suggests that differing medical conditions may create alternate constellations of BID, reflects the need for body image researchers to assess psychometrics across medical populations and may have clinical implications for BID interventions. (+info)
A machine learning predictor of facial attractiveness revealing human-like psychophysical biases.
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