NO RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INTELLIGENCE AND FACIAL ATTRACTIVENESS IN A LARGE, GENETICALLY INFORMATIVE SAMPLE

How smart is my child? The judgment accuracy of parents regarding their children's cognitive ability

Parents' judgment of their children's cognitive ability is important for providing adequate learning environments. This study examined parents' judgment accuracy with 2346 children (M = 8.94 years; 48.3% girls) and their parents (1283 mothers, 426 fathers, and 637 parental pairs). The data were collected between September 2012 and February 2014 in Germany. Latent regression analyses were conducted for the overall sample and by grade (nGrade1&2 = 830; nGrade3&4 = 1516). Characteristics of the child (gender, birth order) and parents (gender, socioeconomic background) were investigated as moderators. Children's cognitive ability explained 34%/25%/37% (overall sample/Grade1&2/Grade3&4) of the variance in parental judgments. Judgments depended more on children's academic achievement than on cognitive ability. Parents judged their son's intelligence more accurately than their daughter's and first-born children more accurately than last-born children. Higher-educated parents showed higher judgment accuracy.

Multidimensional Indicators as Enablers on Perception of Facial Beauty and Appearance among Indian Population: A Descriptive Cross-Sectional Study

Background

Facial appearance has been a flagbearer of "beauty" since time immemorial. Perception of beauty is highly influenced by cultural, interpersonal, and intra-personal variations.

Objectives

This study aimed to assess the perception of facial beauty and appearance through multidimensional influencing indicators among the Indian population, and to determine whether the physically attractive person possesses more personal and socially desirable traits than the comparatively less attractive individual.

Materials and Methods

A study population of 474 with equal male and female population of Indian origin was selected. Their perception was assessed based on the prevalidated, self-administered questionnaire using a tool with five major multidimensional indicators. Six images were selected, three each of male and female subjects, and labeled as A, B, and C, in descending order of attractiveness. The multidimensional influencing indicator tool was self-administered to the participants and the responses were recorded individually.

Results

Photograph A scored the highest out of the three grading scales in both males and females.

Conclusion

The most attractive photograph, in both males and females, was deemed to be associated with higher scores of attractiveness and success.

Physical attraction to reliable, low variability nervous systems: Reaction time variability predicts attractiveness

The human face cues a range of important fitness information, which guides mate selection towards desirable others. Given humans' high investment in the central nervous system (CNS), cues to CNS function should be especially important in social selection. We tested if facial attractiveness preferences are sensitive to the reliability of human nervous system function. Several decades of research suggest an operational measure for CNS reliability is reaction time variability, which is measured by standard deviation of reaction times across trials. Across two experiments, we show that low reaction time variability is associated with facial attractiveness. Moreover, variability in performance made a unique contribution to attractiveness judgements above and beyond both physical health and sex-typicality judgements, which have previously been associated with perceptions of attractiveness. In a third experiment, we empirically estimated the distribution of attractiveness preferences expected by chance and show that the size and direction of our results in Experiments 1 and 2 are statistically unlikely without reference to reaction time variability. We conclude that an operating characteristic of the human nervous system, reliability of information processing, is signalled to others through facial appearance.

Blinded by Beauty: Attractiveness Bias and Accurate Perceptions of Academic Performance

Despite the old adage not to 'judge a book by its cover', facial cues often guide first impressions and these first impressions guide our decisions. Literature suggests there are valid facial cues that assist us in assessing someone's health or intelligence, but such cues are overshadowed by an 'attractiveness halo' whereby desirable attributions are preferentially ascribed to attractive people. The impact of the attractiveness halo effect on perceptions of academic performance in the classroom is concerning as this has shown to influence students' future performance. We investigated the limiting effects of the attractiveness halo on perceptions of actual academic performance in faces of 100 university students. Given the ambiguity and various perspectives on the definition of intelligence and the growing consensus on the importance of conscientiousness over intelligence in predicting actual academic performance, we also investigated whether perceived conscientiousness was a more accurate predictor of academic performance than perceived intelligence. Perceived conscientiousness was found to be a better predictor of actual academic performance when compared to perceived intelligence and perceived academic performance, and accuracy was improved when controlling for the influence of attractiveness on judgments. These findings emphasize the misleading effect of attractiveness on the accuracy of first impressions of competence, which can have serious consequences in areas such as education and hiring. The findings also have implications for future research investigating impression accuracy based on facial stimuli.