Interactions between masculinity--femininity and apparent health in face preferences

Finlay G. Smith, Benedict C. Jones, Lisa M. DeBruine and Anthony C. Little

Behavioral Ecology, 2009, vol. 20, issue 2, 441-445

Abstract: Consistent with Getty's (2002. Signaling health versus parasites. Am Nat. 159:363--371.) proposal that cues to long-term health and cues to current condition are at least partly independent, recent research on human face preferences has found divergent effects of masculinity--femininity, a cue to long-term health, and apparent health, a cue to current condition. In light of this, we tested for interactions between these 2 cues. Participants viewed composite images of opposite-sex faces that had been manufactured in combinations of high and low apparent health and masculinity--femininity. Preferences for masculinity in men's faces and femininity in women's faces were stronger when judging the attractiveness of faces with high apparent health than when judging the attractiveness of faces with low apparent health. Similarly, preferences for high apparent health were stronger for judgments of masculine men's faces and feminine women's faces than for judgments of feminine men's faces and masculine women's faces, respectively. Interactions between apparent health and masculinity--femininity when forming face preferences may function to optimize how masculinity--femininity and apparent health are used to infer the quality of potential mates and highlight the complexity and sophistication of the perceptual mechanisms that underpin face preferences. Copyright 2009, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arn141 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:20:y:2009:i:2:p:441-445

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().