The DOI matches its Crossref record; 15 of the 15 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Evolutionary Psychology of Facial Beauty
Abstract
What makes a face attractive and why do we have the preferences we do? Emergence of preferences early in development and cross-cultural agreement on attractiveness challenge a long-held view that our preferences reflect arbitrary standards of beauty set by cultures. Averageness, symmetry, and sexual dimorphism are good candidates for biologically based standards of beauty. A critical review and meta-analyses indicate that all three are attractive in both male and female faces and across cultures. Theorists have proposed that face preferences may be adaptations for mate choice because attractive traits signal important aspects of mate quality, such as health. Others have argued that they may simply be by-products of the way brains process information. Although often presented as alternatives, I argue that both kinds of selection pressures may have shaped our perceptions of facial beauty.
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Citations
Cites
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“Agreement about which faces are attractive not only occurs between men and women, but also between people from different cultures (e.g., Langlois et al. 2000).”
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“A preference for average (and symmetric) faces could also be a by-product of their subjective familiarity and a preference for familiar stimuli (Bornstein 1989, Halberstadt et al. 2003, Langlois & Roggman 1990, Langlois et al. 1994, Light et al. 1981, Rhodes et al. 2001a, Zajonc 1968).”
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Cited by
Wang, Y., & Kosinski, M. (2018) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/pspa0000098 · Cited by 766
Social Psychological Face Perception: Why Appearance Matters
Zebrowitz, L. A., & Montepare, J. M. (2008) · Social and Personality Psychology Compass · doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00109.x · Cited by 672
The Human Face as a Dynamic Tool for Social Communication
Jack, R. E., & Schyns, P. G. (2015) · Current Biology · doi:10.1016/j.cub.2015.05.052 · Cited by 405
The Architecture of Reward Value Coding in the Human Orbitofrontal Cortex
Sescousse, G., Redouté, J., & Dreher, J.-C. (2010) · The Journal of Neuroscience · doi:10.1523/jneurosci.3501-10.2010 · Cited by 353
A comparative view of face perception.
Leopold, D. A., & Rhodes, G. (2010) · Journal of Comparative Psychology · doi:10.1037/a0019460 · Cited by 311
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Rhodes, G.
- Venue
- Annual Review of Psychology
- Publisher
- Annual Reviews
- Published
- 2006-01-01
- Volume
- 57
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 199-226
- ISSN
- 0066-4308 (ISSN-L)
- 1545-2085
- OpenAlex
- W2166711410
- Cited by
- 1,750
- References
- 15
- FWCI
- 9.08
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
