Women look for sex appeal, facial aesthetics in men .Women find a combination of sex appeal and facial aesthetics irresistible in men, especially when they are looking out for potential mates, says a new study. "We have found that women evaluate facial attractiveness on two levels -- a sexual level, based on specific facial features like the jawbone, cheekbone and lips, and a non-sexual level based on overall aesthetics," said Robert G. Franklin. Franklin is a graduate student of psychology at Penn State University."At the most basic sexual level, attractiveness represents a quality that should increase reproductive potential, like fertility or health." On the non-sexual side, attractiveness can be perceived on the whole, where brains judge beauty based on the sum of the parts they see. "But up until now, this (dual-process) concept had not been tested," Franklin explained. Psychologists showed 50 heterosexual female college students a variety of male and female faces. They asked participants to rate what they saw as both hypothetical dates and hypothetical lab partners on a scale of one to seven.
The first question was designed to invoke a sexual basis of determining attractiveness, while the second was geared to an aesthetic one. This part of the experiment served as a baseline for the next phase. Psychologists then presented the same faces to another set of 50 heterosexual female students. Some of these faces, however, were split horizontally, with the upper and lower halves shifted in opposite directions. The scientists asked these participants to rate the overall attractiveness of the split and whole faces on the same scale.
By dividing the faces in half and disrupting the test subjects total facial processing, the researchers believed that women would rely more on specific facial features to determine attractiveness. They thought that this sexual route would come into play particularly when the participants saw faces that were suited as hypothetical dates rather than lab partners. The study validated their insights. The bottom line is that, at a statistically significant level, splitting the faces in half made the women rely on a purely sexual strategy of processing male faces. The study verifies that these two ways of assessing facial appeal exist and can be separated for women. These findings appeared in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
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