How do external stimuli and our internal state coalesce to create the distinctive aesthetic pleasures that give vibrance to human experience? Neuroaesthetics has so far focused on the neural correlates of observing beautiful stimuli compared to neutral or ugly stimuli, or on neural correlates of judging for beauty as opposed to other judgments. Our group questioned whether this approach is suff...

The female body is more than an anatomical form; it has come to represent everything that a woman is. Beauty is both a woman’s being and her worth. In “Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source,” Susan Sontag explores the contradictions and consequences inherent in modern standards of beauty. According to Sontag, beauty’s association with women has caused the depreciation of women, just as women...

Human observers are constantly bombarded with a vast amount of information. Selective attention helps us to quickly process what is important while ignoring the irrelevant. In this study, we demonstrate that information that has not entered observers' consciousness, such as interocularly suppressed (invisible) erotic pictures, can direct the distribution of spatial attention. Furthermore, invis...

In the United States, public concern in sexual matters and stigmatization of sexual identities make people retreat into privacy. This sexual constraint makes people experience shame and guilt. According to Scheff, shaming is a cause of violence. In contrast, the German society shows less public concern and social opposition in the sexual-erotic domain. This sexuality allows privatization as ind...

n modern culture, beauty reigns supreme. Everywhere we look—whether it's magazines, TV shows or movies—beautiful people dominate. We aspire to be beautiful and if we're not, we are intrigued by the possibility of becoming so. Witness the popularity of shows such as "Extreme Makeover" and "Dr. 90210." Our quest for beauty isn't a modern obsession. Philosophers and poets chronicle the importance ...

Those who are physically attractive reap many benefits—from higher average wages to a wider variety of mate choices. Recent studies have investigated what constitutes beauty and how beauty affects explicit social judgments, but little is known about the perceptual or cognitive processing that is affected by aesthetic judgments of faces and why beauty affects our behavior. In this study, the aut...