OBJECTIVE The authors examine associations of three sources of women's aging anxiety--declining attractiveness, health, and fertility--with social contexts of their lives, including locations in systems of inequality, connections to institutions, relationships, and health. They also explore links between aging anxieties and distress. METHOD Employing data from the National Survey of Midlife D...

Facial attractiveness has long been a topic of interest for cognitive scientists. Early psychological research has found that averageness, distinctiveness and familiarity of a face can influence facial attractiveness. However, faces also convey rich social information. How various social features are related to facial attractiveness hasn’t been systematically studied before. We investigate faci...

Rarely has one research area gained as much attention as that which is observed for female physical attractiveness. The past decade has resulted in numerous, exciting developments, particularly with respect to three proposed determinants of beauty: waist to hip ratio (WHR), body mass index (BMI), and curvaceousness. The goal of our paper is to provide a highly necessary review of contemporary r...

Previous studies document that attractiveness predicts life outcomes, including well-being and social connectedness. This study investigates whether the attractiveness–outcomes link is especially strong in settings, such as many urban areas, that promote relationship constructions as a product of personal choice. This link may weaken in settings, such as many rural areas, that promote less volu...

AIMS To explore the enhancing effect of alcohol consumption on attractiveness ratings, in that few studies on the Beer Goggles effect control the stimuli attractiveness level and researchers have seldom considered extending the effect to stimuli other than faces. METHODS Male and female participants (n = 103) were randomly assigned to alcohol consumption or placebo groups. Both groups were as...

The current study examined the relationship between women’s physical attractiveness – as rated by themselves and a set of third-party raters – and their mating strategy and sexual experience. Male (N = 105) and female (N = 113) undergraduates rated the attractiveness of face and body photographs of 93 female undergraduates. Attractiveness ratings – particularly bodily attractiveness ratings – w...

We estimate the earnings premium for beauty in an occupation where returns to physical attractiveness are likely to be important: commercial sex work. Using data from sex workers in Ecuador and Mexico, we find that a one standard deviation increase in attractiveness yields 10-15 percent higher earnings. Including controls for personal characteristics (communication ability and desirability of p...

An impressive empirical literature suggests that physical attractiveness is associated with interpersonal attraction and with specific personality traits, some of which are favorable and many of which are objectively unrelated to attractiveness. Interestingly, much of the research investigating the impact of attractiveness on liking and personality inference has not accounted for the role of th...

The correlation of physical attractiveness in romantic partners has been widely documented. However, it has also repeatedly been demonstrated that people are largely unaware of their own attractiveness, which raises the question about the mechanism responsible for the within-pair matching. One hitherto unexplored possibility is that low accuracy in attractiveness self-assessments results from m...

Facial attractiveness has been studied extensively, but little research has examined the stability of facial attractiveness of individuals across different stages of development. We conducted a study examining the relationship between facial attractiveness in infants (age 24 months and under) and the same individuals as young adults (age 16-18 years) using infant and adult photographs from high...