Waist-to-hip ratio and female attractiveness. Evidence from photographic stimuli and methodological considerations

Henss, Ronald

doi:10.1016/s0191-8869(99)00115-4

Cited by 158 publications

(127 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Interestingly, the viewing time allocated to the arms was significantly less than all other body regions, indicating its lack of relevance in judging female body attractiveness and size. As women tend to deposit a larger amount of fat onto the lower body parts (e.g., buttocks and thighs; Henss, 2000), these regions may contain more diagnostic cues for body attractiveness and body size assessment than other body regions such as the arms. It seems that in the context of mate selection theory (Buss, 2003), women predominantly attend to the body regions men looking for in a mate, probably to assess both the competition and their relative mate value.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women gaze behaviour in assessing female bodies: the effects of clothing, body size, own body composition and body satisfaction

Cundall

Guo

2015

Psychological Research

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Often with minimally clothed figures depicting extreme body sizes, previous studies have shown women tend to gaze at evolutionary determinants of attractiveness when viewing female bodies, possibly for self-evaluation purposes, and their gaze distribution is modulated by own body dissatisfaction level. To explore to what extent women's body-viewing gaze behaviour is affected by clothing type, dress size, subjective measurements of regional body satisfaction and objective measurements of own body composition (e.g., chest size, body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio), in this self-paced body attractiveness and body size judgement experiment, we compared healthy, young women's gaze distributions when viewing female bodies in tight and loose clothing of different dress sizes. In contrast to tight clothing, loose clothing biased gaze away from the waist-hip to the leg region, and subsequently led to enhanced body attractiveness ratings and body size underestimation for larger female bodies, indicating the important role of clothing in mediating women's body perception. When viewing preferred female bodies, women's higher satisfaction of a specific body region was associated with an increased gaze towards neighbouring body areas, implying satisfaction might reduce the need for comparison of confident body parts; furthermore undesirable body composition measurements were correlated with a gaze avoidance process if the construct was less changeable (i.e. chest size) but a gaze comparison process if the region was more changeable (i.e. body mass index, dress size). Clearly, own body satisfaction and body composition measurements had an evident impact on women's body-viewing gaze allocation, possibly through different cognitive processes.3

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women gaze behaviour in assessing female bodies: the effects of clothing, body size, own body composition and body satisfaction

Cundall

Guo

2015

Psychological Research

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“…It has also been argued that, in general, research on FPA continually relies on weak methodologies (Henss, 2000) or is of low ecological validity, relative to facial attractiveness research. Ecological validity is an important consideration, as it is the extent to which research findings are generalizable across settings or environmental conditions, or most importantly, from experimental conditions to differing environments.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Success Is All in the Measures: Androgenousness, Curvaceousness, and Starring Frequencies in Adult Media Actresses

Voracek

Fisher

2006

Arch Sex Behav

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The debate of whether body-mass index (BMI) or waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) is the primary visual cue to female physical attractiveness (FPA) has generated considerable interest. However, experiments addressing this question typically have limited ecological validity and do not capture the ultimate goal of FPA, which is to elicit male sexual arousal. Hence, using an unobtrusive measures design, we retrieved movie and magazine starring frequencies of 125 adult media actresses from a company's database, operationalized starring frequencies as FPA measures, and tested their relationship to actresses' anthropometric data. Low BMI was related to frequent movie starring, while WHR, waistto-bust ratio (WBR), and bust size were not. Conversely, low WHR, low WBR, and larger bust size were related to frequent magazine starring, while BMI was not. Visual cues to FPA might be domain-specific, with androgenousness cues salient for attractiveness evaluation of moving bodies and curvaceousness cues salient for posing bodies.

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“…The WHRs of the original pictures range from .71 to .76. For pictures that were classified as having smaller WHRs, we narrowed the waist; for pictures that were classified as having higher WHRs, we widened the waist; for pictures that were classified as having normal WHRs, we made no changes (Henss, 2000;Suschinsky et al, 2007). Thus, we created three picture groups and each group had 10 pictures.…”

Section: Stimulus Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender-Specificity in Viewing Time Among Heterosexual Women

Rahman

Zheng

2016

Arch Sex Behav

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Measures of sexual interest tend to be more gender-specific in heterosexual men than in heterosexual women. Cognitive measures, such as viewing time to attractive stimuli, may also show similar patterns of gender-specificity or non-specificity among men and women, and thus serve as useful adjuncts to more direct measures of sexual interest. The objectives of the present research were to determine the extent of gender-specificity in women's viewing times for female pictures (varying in their perceived physical attractiveness) and explore the influence of social comparison of physical appearance on these patterns of responses. In Study 1, we recorded only women's viewing times for pictures of both genders, measured self-reported menstrual cycle phase, and manipulated the waist-to-hip ratio of the women in the female pictures. In Study 2, we recorded women's and men's viewing times, self-reported sexual attraction to pictures of males and females, and physical appearance social comparison.Study 1 found that heterosexual women's viewing time towards female pictures was not associated with manipulation of the perceived attractiveness of those pictures. Study 2 found that heterosexual men were more gender-specific than heterosexual women in their viewing time patterns. We also found that reported sexual attraction and physical appearance social comparison were associated with heterosexual women's viewing times for female pictures, while heterosexual men's viewing times were associated with sexual attraction only. Our results are discussed in relation to the utility of viewing time as an indicator of visual attention towards attractive or sexually appealing visual stimuli.

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Waist-to-hip ratio and female attractiveness. Evidence from photographic stimuli and methodological considerations

Cited by 158 publications

References 22 publications

Women gaze behaviour in assessing female bodies: the effects of clothing, body size, own body composition and body satisfaction

Women gaze behaviour in assessing female bodies: the effects of clothing, body size, own body composition and body satisfaction

Success Is All in the Measures: Androgenousness, Curvaceousness, and Starring Frequencies in Adult Media Actresses

Gender-Specificity in Viewing Time Among Heterosexual Women

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