PSYC 300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Medial Dorsal Nucleus, Orbitofrontal Cortex, Facial Symmetry
17 May 2020
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Document Summary
Facial attractiveness: evolutionary psychology, attractiveness=reproductive fitness. Unconsciously analyzing: health, youth, fertility: facial symmetry, huge cue to health. Freedom from disease, parasites, problems with gestation. Greater fitness: far more attractive naturally, infants 2-3 months of age give adult ratings. Infants spend more time looking at the faces and give higher ratings to attractiveness: high cross-cultural consistency, the orbitofrontal cortex and mediodorsal thalamus are more activated. High fertility period of month: more androgenized (high testosterone) Low fertility: less androgenized: eeg p300: something interesting. Measuring positive deflection 300 milliseconds after they see the faces (some high testosterone and some low testosterone) P300= i"m interested: based on high fertility and low fertility periods. Tom has lots of testoerone: high fertility: tom gets p300, low fertility: tom loses p300, high testosterone = higher fertility. But then when you go off the pill to have kids, you suddenly want a high testoerone male.
