Context-dependent preferences for facial dimorphism in a rural Malaysian population

Scott, Isabel M.; Swami, Viren; Josephson, Steven C.; Penton-Voak, Ian S.

doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2008.02.004

Cited by 49 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…In this way, facial masculinity in men is thought to serve as an honest indicator of good health (Folstad & Karter, 1992;Zahavi, 1975). Consistent with this theory, facial masculinity has been found to be associated with objective (Gangestad, Merriman, & Thompson, 2010;Rantala et al, 2012;Rhodes, Chan, Zebrowitz, & Simmons, 2003;Thornhill & Gangestad, 2006) and perceived health (Rhodes et al, 2003;Scott, Swami, Josephson, & Penton-Voak, 2008). However, the underlying mechanism for this preference is unclear.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 50%

Women's pathogen disgust predicting preference for facial masculinity may be specific to age and study design

Lee

Zietsch

2015

Evolution and Human Behavior

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Facial masculinity in men is thought to be an indicator of good health. Consistent with this idea, previous research has found a positive association between pathogen avoidance (disgust sensitivity) and preference for facial masculinity. However, previous studies are mostly based on young adult participants and targets, using forced-choice preference measures; this begs the question whether the findings generalise to other adult age groups or other preference measures. We address this by conducting three studies assessing facial masculinity preferences of a wider age range of women for a wider age range of male faces. In studies 1 and 2, 447 and 433 women respectively made forced choices between two identical faces that were manipulated on masculinity/femininity. In study 1, face stimuli were manipulated on sexual dimorphism using age-matched templates, while in study 2 young face stimuli were manipulated with older templates and older face stimuli were manipulated using young templates. In the full sample for study 1, no association was found between women's pathogen disgust and masculinity preference, but when limiting the sample to younger women rating younger faces we replicated previous findings of significant association between pathogen disgust and preference for facial masculinity. Results for study 2 found no effect of pathogen disgust sensitivity on facial masculinity preferences regardless of participant and stimuli age. In study 3, the facial masculinity preferences of 386 women were revealed through their attractiveness ratings of natural (unmanipulated) faces. Here, we did not find a significant association of pathogen disgust on facial masculinity preferences, regardless of participant and stimuli age. These results call into question the robustness of the link between women's pathogen avoidance and facial masculinity preference, and raise questions as to why the effect is specific to younger adults and the forced-choice preference measure.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 50%

Women's pathogen disgust predicting preference for facial masculinity may be specific to age and study design

Lee

Zietsch

2015

Evolution and Human Behavior

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“…With increasing selfreported health, women's preferences shifted towards higher levels of masculinity; the peak masculinity preference level was higher for women of better compared to poorer health. This is in line with reasoning that opinions about health might either affect, or help to form, perceptions of women's own condition (Scott et al 2008), but our finding contrasts with predictions made regarding the importance of male masculinity as a cue to health (De Barra et al 2013;Feinberg et al 2012). From the condition perspective, women who view themselves as attractive and healthy should prefer more masculine partners, yet from the immunocompetence perspective it is women who have had poor health who are thought to prefer more masculine partners.…”

Section: P4: Self-reported Healthmentioning

confidence: 69%

“…Relationship context, i.e. whether women judge men's attractiveness as potential shortor long-term partners, has been shown to moderate women's preferences such that women have been found to prefer more feminine faces in a long-as compared to short-term context (e.g., Scott et al 2008). Importantly, relationship context has also been found to interact with other aspects that impact on women's masculinity preferences, such as individual condition (Little et al 2001;Penton-Voak et al 2003;Scott et al 2008), environmental condition ) and relationship status .…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…a cue to health, is of greater value than for women of self-reported good health (De Barra et al 2013;Feinberg et al 2012). It is possible that health might affect self-perceived mate value (Scott et al 2008), and a prediction of the opposite direction is conceivable-that for women with poor health, and therefore lower mate value, the costs of choosing a highly masculine (and low-investing mate) outweigh benefits, reflected in a preference for feminine men. We therefore tested the general prediction that self-reported health affects masculinity preferences.…”

Section: P4: Self-reported Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Women’s Preferences for Men’s Facial Masculinity: Trade-Off Accounts Revisited

Holzleitner

Perrett

2017

Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology

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Studies on mate preferences have demonstrated that women's perception of male attractiveness is sensitive to men's facial masculinity, and that women's preferences for facial masculinity are subject to individual differences, such as own condition. These individual differences have been linked to potential tradeoffs that women face given the hypothesized benefits and costs that masculinity may cue in a potential partner. Whereas most studies based conclusions regarding such trade-offs on shifts in mean preferences for a feminized vs. masculinized face shape, here we directly investigated attractiveness as a function of different levels of masculinity. Using computer-graphic methods, we manipulated the facial masculinity of men's 3D faces to vary between extremely feminine and hypermasculine, and assessed women's preferences for these different masculinity levels in the light of individual differences in self-rated attractiveness, financial worries, pathogen disgust sensitivity, self-reported health and relationship status. Our findings show that some individual differences shift preferences towards a generally lower or higher masculinity level, whereas others affect the tolerance to low vs. high levels of masculinity. We suggest that the use of preference curves allows for a more comprehensive investigation of how and why women's preferences for masculinity may shift under different contexts.

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“…The proposal that fertile women should be attractive to men is seemingly uncontroversial because males who discriminatively mate with fertile females should achieve a straightforward reproductive advantage over those males who do not, with all other factors being equal (6). Although direct associations between facial femininity and fertility have not been demonstrated, the consensus from Western preferences, and from the limited crosscultural data available, is that femininity is attractive, as predicted by the fertility hypothesis (14)(15)(16)(17). In environments where fertility is high and variable, this relationship should be even more apparent.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Human preferences for sexually dimorphic faces may be evolutionarily novel

Scott

Clark

Josephson

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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161

147

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A large literature proposes that preferences for exaggerated sex typicality in human faces (masculinity/femininity) reflect a long evolutionary history of sexual and social selection. This proposal implies that dimorphism was important to judgments of attractiveness and personality in ancestral environments. It is difficult to evaluate, however, because most available data come from largescale, industrialized, urban populations. Here, we report the results for 12 populations with very diverse levels of economic development. Surprisingly, preferences for exaggerated sex-specific traits are only found in the novel, highly developed environments. Similarly, perceptions that masculine males look aggressive increase strongly with development and, specifically, urbanization. These data challenge the hypothesis that facial dimorphism was an important ancestral signal of heritable mate value. One possibility is that highly developed environments provide novel opportunities to discern relationships between facial traits and behavior by exposing individuals to large numbers of unfamiliar faces, revealing patterns too subtle to detect with smaller samples.facial attractiveness | evolution | cross-cultural | aggression | stereotyping

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Context-dependent preferences for facial dimorphism in a rural Malaysian population

Cited by 49 publications

References 25 publications

Women's pathogen disgust predicting preference for facial masculinity may be specific to age and study design

Women's pathogen disgust predicting preference for facial masculinity may be specific to age and study design

Women’s Preferences for Men’s Facial Masculinity: Trade-Off Accounts Revisited

Human preferences for sexually dimorphic faces may be evolutionarily novel

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