Project: Facial Attractiveness

Anubhav Bimbisariye(11131) Brijesh Chandrakar(11208)

Humans in societies around the world discriminate between potential mates on the basis of attractiveness. One of the major component of attractiveness is facial attractiveness. From an evolutionary perspective, a reasonable working hypothesis is that the psychological mechanisms underlying attractiveness judgments are adaptations that have evolved in the service of choosing a mate so as to increase gene propagation throughout evolutionary history. The main hypothesis that has directed evolutionary psychology research into facial attractiveness is that these judgments reflect information about what can be broadly defined as an individual’s health, [1]. Studies of physical attractiveness have attempted to identify the features that contribute to the attractiveness by studying relationships between attractiveness and (a) symmetry, (b) averageness, c) non average sexually dimorphic features (hormone markers), [2]. We propose to study the facial symmetry, averageness and secondary sex characters. Facial symmetry can be studied by generating symmetrical images of a person and recording responses about attractiveness of those images by volunteers of opposite sex. Averageness can be studied by comparing individual faces vs composite faces, [3]. Cunningham and colleagues (Refs 4, 5) first showed the importance of sex-specific facial hormone markers in attractiveness judgments by measuring features in facial photos with calipers (also Ref. 6). Johnston and Franklin (Ref. 7) instructed American men to create their prototype of a beautiful adult female face using facial-feature options provided in computer images. The beautiful faces had extreme secondary sex traits (e.g. full lips and high cheekbones). We propose to create computer generated beautiful faces of men and women as done in the above paper. The essence of our whole project will be to test the current hypothesis and model of the facial attractiveness in humans.

REFERENCES:

1. Thornhill, Randy, and Steven W. Gangestad. "Facial attractiveness." Trends in cognitive sciences 3.12 (1999): 452-460.
2. Fink, Bernhard, and Ian Penton-Voak. "Evolutionary psychology of facial attractiveness." Current Directions in Psychological Science 11.5 (2002): 154-158.
3. Langlois, Judith H., and Lori A. Roggman. "Attractive faces are only average." Psychological science 1.2 (1990): 115-121.
4. Cunningham, M.R. (1986) Measuring the physical in physical attractiveness: quasi experiments on the sociobiology of female facial beauty J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 50, 925-935
5. Cunningham, M.R., Barbee, A.P. and Pike, C.L. (1990) What do women want? Facialmetric assessment of multiple motives in the perception of male physical attractiveness J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 59, 61-72
6. Michiels, G. and Sather, A.H. (1994) Determinants of facial attractiveness in a sample of white women Int. J. Adult Orthodont. Orthognath. Surg. 9, 95-103
7. Johnston, V.S. and Franklin, M. (1993) Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Ethol. Sociobiol.14, 183-199