The emphasis in the published literature has mostly been on symmetry as the critical source for beauty judgment. In fact, both symmetry and asymmetry serve as highly aesthetic sources of beauty, whether the context is perceptual or conceptual. The human brain is characterized by symbolic cognition and this type of cognition facilitates a range of aesthetic reactions. For example, both art and n...

.........................................................................................iii TABLE OF CONTENTS...........................................................................iv LIST OF TABLES...................................................................................vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW...........................1 Attractiveness Stereotypes............

Although human preference for beauty is common and compelling in daily life, it remains unknown whether such preference is essentially subserved by social cognitive demands or natural tendency towards beauty encoded in the human mind intrinsically. Here we demonstrate experimentally that humans automatically exhibit preference for visual and moral beauty without explicit cognitive efforts. Usin...

Beauty Queens and Battling Knights: Risk Taking and Attractiveness in Chess We explore the relationship between attractiveness and risk taking in chess. We use a large international panel dataset on chess competitions which includes a control for the players’ skill in chess. This data is combined with results from a survey on an online labor market where participants were asked to rate the phot...

"Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye" (Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost), but the bodily features governing this critical biological choice are still debated. Eye movement studies have demonstrated that males sample coarse body regions expanding from the face, the breasts and the midriff, while making female attractiveness judgements with natural vision. However, the visual system ubiquito...

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...

Much research presented recently supports the idea that the human perception of attractiveness is datadriven and largely irrespective of the perceiver. This suggests using pattern analysis techniques for beauty analysis. Several scientific papers on this subject are appearing in image processing, computer vision and pattern analysis contexts, or use techniques of these areas. In this paper, we ...

We hypothesized that facial attractiveness represents a dual judgment, a combination of reward-based, sexual processes, and aesthetic, cognitive processes. Herein we describe a study that demonstrates that sexual and nonsexual processes both contribute to attractiveness judgments and that these processes can be dissociated. Female participants rated the general attractiveness of faces presented...