Familiarity with Own Population's Appearance Influences Facial Preferences

Mate assessment based on physical characteristics: a review and reflection

Mate choice, and sex differences in romantic behaviours, represented one of the first major applications of evolutionary biology to human behaviour. This paper reviews Darwinian approaches to heterosexual mate assessment based on physical characteristics, placing the literature in its historical context (1871-1979), before turning (predominantly) to psychological research on attractiveness judgements based on physical characteristics. Attractiveness is consistently inferred across multiple modalities, with biological theories explaining why we differentiate certain individuals, on average, from others. Simultaneously, it is a judgement that varies systematically in light of our own traits, environment, and experiences. Over 30 years of research has generated robust effects alongside reasons to be humble in our lack of understanding of the precise physiological mechanisms involved in mate assessment. This review concludes with three questions to focus attention in further research, and proposes that our romantic preferences still provide a critical window into the evolution of human sexuality.

Testing Mate Choice Hypotheses in a Transitional Small Scale Population

Objective

Tests of theories of mate choice often rely on data gathered in White, industrialised samples and this is especially the case for studies of facial attraction. Our understanding of preferences for sexual dimorphism is currently in flux and a number of hypotheses require testing in more diverse participant samples. The current study uses opportunistically gathered facial dimorphism preference data from 271 participants in rural Nicaragua, and 40 from the national capital Managua. We assess pre-registered hypotheses drawn from sexual selection theory, and from more recent approaches which consider the impacts of economic development and cultural ‘modernisation’ on mate preferences.

Methods

Participants verbally reported demographic data, and indicated preferences for five male and five female pairs of faces manipulated to differ in sexually dimorphic facial structure based on a sample of Salvadoran individuals.

Results

While urban participants showed a preference for more feminine female faces, this preference was not evident in the rural participants. Neither urban nor rural participants showed any directional preference for masculinised/feminised male faces. Furthermore, there was no support for any other pre-registered hypothesis.

Conclusions

Our results are consistent with previous studies showing no interest in facial dimorphism in less globally-acculturated, or market integrated, populations. Together, this suggests that while facial dimorphism may be subject to systematically varying preferences amongst some low-fertility, industrialised populations, it is not a feature which is likely to have been important in ancestral populations. We call for further work attempting to replicate well known mate choice phenomena in more diverse samples.

Self-rated attractiveness predicts preferences for sexually dimorphic facial characteristics in a culturally diverse sample

Individuals who are more attractive are thought to show a greater preference for facial sexual dimorphism, potentially because individuals who perceive themselves as more physically attractive believe they will be better able to attract and/or retain sexually dimorphic partners. Evidence for this link is mixed, however, and recent research suggests the association between self-rated attractiveness and preferences for facial sexual dimorphism may not generalise to non-Western cultures. Here, we assess whether self-rated attractiveness and self-rated health predict facial sexual dimorphism preferences in a large and culturally diverse sample of 6907 women and 2851 men from 41 countries. We also investigated whether ecological factors, such as country health/development and inequality, might moderate this association. Our analyses found that men and women who rated themselves as more physically attractive reported stronger preferences for exaggerated sex-typical characteristics in other-sex faces. This finding suggests that associations between self-rated attractiveness and preferences for sexually dimorphic facial characteristics generalise to a culturally diverse sample and exist independently of country-level factors. We also found that country health/development moderated the effect of men's self-rated attractiveness on femininity preferences, such that men from countries with high health/development showed a positive association between self-rated attractiveness and femininity preference, while men from countries with low health/development showed the opposite trend.

Perceived attractiveness of Czech faces across 10 cultures: Associations with sexual shape dimorphism, averageness, fluctuating asymmetry, and eye color

Research on the perception of faces typically assumes that there are some universal values of attractiveness which are shared across individuals and cultures. The perception of attractiveness may, however, vary across cultures due to local differences in both facial morphology and standards of beauty. To examine cross-cultural consensus in the ratings of attractiveness, we presented a set of 120 non-manipulated photographs of Czech faces to ten samples of raters from both European (Czech Republic, Estonia, Sweden, Romania, Turkey, Portugal) and non-European countries (Brazil, India, Cameroon, Namibia). We examined the relative contribution of three facial markers (sexual shape dimorphism, averageness, fluctuating asymmetry) to the perception of attractiveness as well as the possible influence of eye color, which is a locally specific trait. In general, we found that both male and female faces which were closer to the average and more feminine in shape were regarded as more attractive, while fluctuating asymmetry had no effect. Despite a high cross-cultural consensus on attractiveness standards, significant differences in the perception of attractiveness seem to be related to the level of socio-economic development (as measured by the Human Development Index, HDI). Attractiveness ratings by raters from low-HDI countries (India, Cameroon, Namibia) converged less with ratings from Czech Republic than ratings from high-HDI countries (European countries and Brazil). With respect to eye color, some local patterns emerged which we discuss as a consequence of negative frequency-dependent selection.

Fear of Violence among Colombian Women Is Associated with Reduced Preferences for High-BMI Men

Recent studies reveal that violence significantly contributes to explaining individual’s facial preferences. Women who feel at higher risk of violence prefer less-masculine male faces. Given the importance of violence, we explore its influence on people’s preferences for a different physical trait. Masculinity correlates positively with male strength and weight or body mass index (BMI). In fact, masculinity and BMI tend to load on the same component of trait perception. Therefore we predicted that individuals’ perceptions of danger from violence will relate to preferences for facial cues to low-BMI. In two studies in Colombia, men and women from Bogota, Medellin, and surrounding communities were shown pairs of faces transformed to epitomize the shape correlates of men with high or low-BMI. The images were of European, Salvadoran, or Colombian men. Participants were asked to choose the face they considered most attractive. Subsequently, participants answered a survey about their health (e.g., frequency of illnesses the past year), media access (e.g., frequency of Internet use), education level (e.g., graduating from high school), and experiences/perceptions of violence in study 1 and about specific types of violence (public and domestic) in study 2. Results from both studies showed that women who experienced/perceived higher levels of violence preferred faces of low-BMI Salvadoran men. Preferences for low-BMI facial cues were significantly explained by violence (public or domestic), even after controlling for all other variables (including age, education, health, and media access). These results may reflect women’s strategy to avoid male partners capable of inflicting harm.

Face Processing in Infancy and Beyond: The Case of Social Categories

Prior reviews of infant face processing have emphasized how infants respond to faces in general. This review highlights how infants come to respond differentially to social categories of faces based on differential experience, with a focus on race and gender. We examine six different behaviors: preference, recognition, scanning, category formation, association with emotion, and selective learning. Although some aspects of infant responding to face race and gender may be accounted for by traditional models of perceptual development, other aspects suggest the need for a broader model that links perceptual development with social and emotional development. We also consider how responding to face race and gender in infancy may presage responding to these categories beyond infancy and discuss how social biases favoring own-race and female faces are formed.

Facial Adiposity, Attractiveness, and Health: A Review

The relationship between facial cues and perceptions of health and attractiveness in others plays an influential role in our social interactions and mating behaviors. Several facial cues have historically been investigated in this regard, with facial adiposity being the newest addition. Evidence is mounting that a robust link exists between facial adiposity and attractiveness, as well as perceived health. Facial adiposity has also been linked to various health outcomes such as cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, blood pressure, immune function, diabetes, arthritis, oxidative stress, hormones, and mental health. Though recent advances in the analysis of facial morphology has led to significant strides in the description and quantification of facial cues, it is becoming increasingly clear that there is a great deal of nuance in the way that humans use and integrate facial cues to form coherent social or health judgments of others. This paper serves as a review of the current literature on the relationship between facial adiposity, attractiveness, and health. A key component in utilizing facial adiposity as a cue to health and attractiveness perceptions is that people need to be able to estimate body mass from facial cues. To estimate the strength of the relationship between perceived facial adiposity and body mass, a meta-analysis was conducted on studies that quantified the relationship between perceived facial adiposity and BMI/percentage body fat. Summary effect size estimates indicate that participants could reliably estimate BMI from facial cues alone (r = 0.71, n = 458).