In this study, we combined the behavioral and objective approach in the field of empirical aesthetics. First, we studied the perception of beauty by investigating shifts in evaluation on perceived beauty of abstract artworks (Experiment 1). Because the participants showed heterogeneous individual preferences for the paintings, we divided them into seven clusters for the test. The experiment rev...

Beauty and physical appearance are considered to be of great importance in today’s society. In the U.S., many strive for physical perfection, and much attention is focused on the way one looks. A beauty ideal has been created over time through the combination of several elements within American culture, and this ideal image attempts to define female beauty as fitting into a certain mold. Certai...

We studied the neural mechanisms that are engaged during the experience of beauty derived from sorrow and from joy, two experiences that share a common denominator (beauty) but are linked to opposite emotional valences. Twenty subjects viewed and rerated, in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, 120 images which each had classified into the following four categories: beautiful and sa...

A model of partnership formation based on two traits, called beauty and character, is presented. There are two classes of individual and partners must be of different classes. Individuals prefer prospective partners with a high beauty measure and of a similar character. This problem may be interpreted as e.g. a job search problem in which the classes are employer and employee, or a mate choice ...

This study begins with critically accepted interpretations of the poem “Ode to a nightingale”, taken from established critical positions regarding Keats. It shall then move on to peruse Keats in a novel manner, adopting The Act of Reading theory of Wolfgang Iser as a working basis. Iser (1978:958)states “the fact that completely different readers can be differently affected by the „reality‟ of ...

Based on 20 semi-structured interviews, this qualitative study explores young Chinese women’s understandings of female beauty. It reveals that participants’ beauty are not limited to outer (waizaimei, 外在美), but rather foreground the importance ‘inner beauty’ (neizaimei, 内在美). The data found these concepts have a symbiotic relationship whereby each affects other. According findings, inner and op...

The production of beauty quarks in ep collisions should be accurately calculable in perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) since the large mass of the b quark provides a hard scale. Therefore it is interesting to compare such predictions to results using photoproduction events where a low-virtuality photon, emitted by the incoming lepton, collides with a parton from the incoming proton. A me...

An overview over the recent heavy flavor results of the H1 and ZEUS collaborations is presented. Various techniques to tag the heavy quark, which allow to explore different phase space regions, are employed. Predictions of pertubative QCD are compared to the charm and beauty production data. Charm and beauty fractions of the proton structure function F2 are extracted.

Recent measurements of the lifetimes and semileptonic branching fractions of beauty baryons at LEP and the Tevatron are reviewed and new world averages are presented. There remains some discrepancy between the theoretical predictions for the lifetimes of beauty baryons and the observed values.