We model a social-encounter network where linked nodes match for reproduction in a manner depending probabilistically on each node's attractiveness. The developed model reveals that increasing either the network's mean degree or the "choosiness" exercised during pair formation increases the strength of positive assortative mating. That is, we note that attractiveness is correlated among mated n...

Previous studies have shown that preferences for direct versus averted gaze are modulated by emotional expressions and physical attractiveness. For example, preferences for direct gaze are stronger when judging happy or physically attractive faces than when judging disgusted or physically unattractive faces. Here we show that preferences for front versus three-quarter views of faces, in which g...

Facial attractiveness has long been argued upon varied emphases by philosophers, artists, psychologists and biologists. A number of studies empirically investigated how facial attractiveness was influenced by 2D facial characteristics, such as symmetry, averageness and golden ratio. However, few implementations of facial beauty assessment were based on 3D facial features. The purpose of this pa...

Although the averageness hypothesis of facial attractiveness proposes that the attractiveness of faces is mostly a consequence of their averageness, 1 study has shown that caricaturing highly attractive faces makes them mathematically less average but more attractive. Here the authors systematically test the averageness hypothesis in 5 experiments using both rating and visual adaptation paradig...

Face attractiveness is a social characteristic that we often use to make first-pass judgments about the people around us. However, these judgments are highly influenced by our surrounding social world, and researchers still understand little about the mechanisms underlying these influences. In a series of 3 experiments, we use a novel sequential rating paradigm that enables us to measure biases...

Previous research documents that men and women can accurately judge male physical strength from gait, but also that the sexes differ in attractiveness judgments of strong and weak male walkers. Women's (but not men's) attractiveness assessments of strong male walkers are higher than for weak male walkers. Here, we extend this research to assessments of strong and weak male walkers in Chile, Ger...

Waitresses completed an on-line survey about their physical characteristics, self-perceived attractiveness and sexiness, and average tips. The waitresses' self-rated physical attractiveness increased with their breast sizes and decreased with their ages, waist-to-hip ratios, and body sizes. Similar effects were observed on self-rated sexiness, with the exception of age, which varied with self-r...

We apply computer vision methods to the task of automatically predicting human attractiveness from frontal face images. A dataset of thousands of images and corresponding scores was obtained from a popular website that asks viewers to rate the attractiveness of the people appearing in the images. Using a combination of radial basis functions and specialized feature detectors, we achieved modera...

This study examines the role of online daters’ physical attractiveness in their profile selfpresentation and, in particular, their use of deception. Sixty-nine online daters identified the deceptions in their online dating profiles and had their photograph taken in the lab. Independent judges rated the online daters’ physical attractiveness. Results show that the lower online daters’ attractive...

Humans exhibit seasonal variation in hormone levels, behaviour, and perception. Here we show that men's assessments of women's attractiveness change also seasonally. In five seasons (from winter 2004 to winter 2005) 114 heterosexual men were asked to assess the attractiveness of the same stimuli: photos of a female with three different waist-to-hip ratios; photos of female breasts, and photos o...