PSY 544 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Online Dating Service, Typical Male
Woe’s prefereces regardig e’s facial appearace
The other thing that seems to be attractive in men's face to women is: the masculinity of
the face
You can scan men and women's faces and you can see that's male faces are characterized
by a square-er jaw than male - female faces tend to be more rounded
So this means that a rounded face is a characteristic of female faces and a square-er face
is a characteristic of a male face
With morphing techniques we can distort faces to either have more of the feminine or
masculine qualities so you can see that in the following images:
Facial masculinity
• Ratings of facial masculinity correlate positively with rated attractive-ness.
• Male face has been morphed with feminine feature: left image
• We can see some consistent differences: male faces tend to have thicker eyebrows -
a thicker brow region - something that sticks out from the face and tend to have
broader and more square jaws
• What we find with such studies is that ratings of facial masculinity correlate with
ratings of attractiveness - if something seems male faces more attractive to women,
it's being a little bit exaggeratedly male so a little more masculine but it isn't a
completely linear relationship. That is, masculinity as it goes up does tend to
positively correlate with attractiveness but the most attractive face is not the most
masculine face
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Woe’s prefereces regardig e’s facial appearace
Johnston et al. (2001)
• Created male faces that morphed from more masculine to more feminine. And
• Asked heterosexual women to search through the morphs to pick: (pick from huge
range of images) pick what you think the avg man looks like and then they are asked
to pick the most attractive male face
• When we look at the difference b/w the two - we see that the most attractive face is
slightly more attractive - the most attractive wasn't the avg face rather the avg face
that was a bit more towards masculine but it also wasn't the most masculine looking
face (which was the one on top)
• They were also asked to picked the faces that looked the most: intelligent, healthy -
• For most intelligent: they picked what looks like a typical male face
• For healthy: they pick the one most attractive
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
