When judging whether the face of men is attractive, women are watching here

When a woman looks at a person's face, in order to judge whether it is "attractive" in a general sense, judging the entire face against aesthetics, while "sexual appeal" It is clear that it is judged by each part of.

There may be men who are said to be "handsome but not sexy", and there are men who do not have much of a beautiful look that is well-organized, but these mechanisms may be the reasons.

Details are as below.What She Sees In You: Facial Attractiveness Explained

Penn State UniversityThe results of this study by Associate Professor Reginald Adams of psychology / neurologyJournal of Experimental Social PsychologyIt was announced in the magazine.

"We found that women judged the" charm "of people's face in two layers.The" sexual "attraction based on specific parts such as jaw bones, cheekbones, lips, "It's a" non-sexual "charm based on a kind of beauty," says Robert G. Franklin, a graduate student majoring in psychology under Professor Adamas. "The most fundamental" sexual appeal "is judged by the appearance of factors that enhance fertility, such as fertilizing ability and health."

Although the concept of these two types of charm is widely penetrated in psychology, it seems that there has never been demonstrated before.

In the experiment, if you first showed a picture of a lot of men and women to 50 girls' university college students and date them with photos, if we suppose that person is a laboratory colleague, we will evaluate the face in 7 steps I did it. The aim of these two assumptions is to evaluate "sexual appeal" and "non-sexual attraction".

After that, I showed the same picture to another 50 non-gay female college students, but in this time some of these pictures were cut horizontally and shifted left and right was used. And we asked subjects in this group to evaluate "fascination in the general sense" of faces of cut and uncut photographs in 7 steps in the same way.

Examples of pictures used for experiments.

© Robert G. Franklin, Penn State

Researchers thought that women would judge whether they are attractive or not by relying on specific parts by dividing the face of the photograph and making it difficult for the subject's brain to treat it as a whole face, I predicted that the route to judge this "sexual appeal" will work strongly, especially in the face that was evaluated as being more desirable as a "date partner" as a "laboratory fellow" in the group experiments. It seems that the experiment showed exactly the result.

"The evaluation of the unbroken face of the second group correlated more strongly with the evaluation by the first group as" a laboratory fellow ", Franklin said. The subjects were able to evaluate the face with a non-sexual overall criterion if the face was not severed.

"In the case of photographs of women, the evaluation of the divided faces also correlated with the non-sexual evaluation by the first group, the only difference being seen when showing a picture of a divided male The evaluation of the second group against the face of the divided male was more strongly correlated with the evaluation of "as a date partner" by the first group. "

In conclusion, it is said that by dividing the face into two, when a woman evaluates the face of a man, he rely on sexual criteria at a statistically significant level. This study proved that when a woman judged the attractiveness of a face there were two routes, one could be separated from the other.

"We do not yet know if the judgment" attractive "will be culturally influenced or whether the brain only processes visual information," Franklin admits. "In the future, how the difference in the cultural background of the subject affects the evaluation of the face, how the hormonal change due to the female's menstrual cycle affects judgment of sexual meaning and charm in non-sexual meaning I'd like to investigate what I am doing. "

A phenomenon in which a woman feels sexual appeal to a heterosex is biologically derived from a desire for instinctive breeding,estrogenIt has been known for a long time that it is controlled by hormones and similar hormones. On the other hand, the approach to judging appeal by comprehensive virtueProgesteroneIt is a mechanism not related to remuneration as compared with feeling of sexual appeal involved.

How this network of complex hormones influence each other, how they are communicated, expressed as consciousness in the brain, how the affected parts of culture by the culture affects are mysterious I will.

"It's a very complicated process, we are trying to figure out which part of the brain is involved first," Franklin says.