In Your Face: The New Science of Human Attraction

by David Perrett

‘come-hither’ face when they see another animal they are keen to groom: they pull their ears very flat against their heads, raise their eyebrows, and smack their lips together rapidly.

‘play face’; it is most frequently seen when two young chimps are cavorting together.

blind babies produce these kinds of social smiles in response to the mother’s voice, suggesting that social smiling is a real human instinct,

On losing contests, competitors from individualistic societies showed less outward expression of shame than competitors from collectivist societies

blind competitors at the Paralympics did not differ in expressing a sense of disappointment whether they were from Asia or America, whereas their sighted counterparts did express this differently according to the country they represented.

If you think it’s a girl … If

when presented in th eriperal visual area, do the twoimages elicit 50:50 responses? -- check the lit

but otherwise remaining inactive.

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‘Mother, if the real DS ever returns do you promise that you will still treat me as a friend and love me?’28

connections between brain systems sometimes get disrupted, for example by bursting blood vessels, by tumours, or by epileptic short-circuits.

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whatever their sexual orientation, men seem to be more visually turned on than women;46 they will work much harder than women to see faces that they regard as beautiful.

inability to see one’s own reflection accurately is quite common in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.49

crocodiles or birds,10 or even fish or frogs.

The cues that the baby uses to spot Mum’s face seem to be contained in her hairdo, specifically the shape of the contours of her head and hairline rather

For an unfamiliar face we are more like an infant, swayed by features external to the face.

same brain regions that control adult reactions to eye gaze are fully operational at four months of age.

offspring learn about parental qualities, such as a particular song the parents keep singing or the colour of their feather coats. Then, as adults, they express sexual interest in individuals with just those characteristics.

A male lamb raised by a goat will grow up to treat goats rather than sheep as playmates, and as an adult it will be sexually attracted to its foster-mother species (goats) more than to its biological-mother species (sheep).

possibility that a baby’s tongue-poking is akin to the toad’s tongue-flicking reflex.

easier to recognize new faces from our own ethnic group than new faces from other groups; this is known as the ‘other-race effect’.

own-species effect whereby we find it easier to distinguish between human faces than between monkey faces. This develops in infancy between the ages of six and nine months,

other-race effect develops between three months and nine months.

Just as human infants favour their own species, by three months of age they favour their own race.

They look more at faces of their own race than at others,52 though racial bias was absent at birth.

both a preference for female faces and a better memory for female faces than for male faces. The opposite is true for babies brought up mainly by men,

do infants show an adult-like sense of aesthetics?

attractive faces more closely match a template that is inborn, or it is just about possible that the infant, after as little as one day’s exposure to different faces, has already learned some general rule about their proportions.

infants not only like attractive tigers better, but also remember them better than unattractive tigers!

moustaches be tattooed on Ainu women in Northern Japan,1 scars from deliberate blows to the head be accentuated by Yanomamö men in Venezuela,2 or teeth be blackened by peoples of Borneo,3 filed by Bogobo women in the Philippines, or chipped down to the gums by the Moi of Vietnam?

The necks of Karen-Padaung women in Thailand are lengthened using neck rings, for example; the lips of Kayapo men of Brazil and the Mursi women of Ethiopia are enlarged with plates made of pottery or wood; and the earlobes of Kikuyu men in Kenya and the Rikhaksta men in Brazil are elongated by means of weights.

in peer-reviewed scientific journals there is no evidence to show that the golden ratio is more prevalent in beautiful faces than in unattractive faces. If someone tells you that

male barn swallows with more symmetrical tail feathers mate earlier in the breeding season, and raise more offspring per year,

lack of folate (a B vitamin), for example, can slow or even halt DNA production, which seriously disrupts development. Worse, folate deficiency can cause change in the actual DNA code itself when it gets copied for each new cell.

Men with symmetrical bodies apparently have a higher IQ, they run faster,14 dance better,15 sing better,16 are less depressed, smell sexier, sound nicer, and produce more and faster-swimming sperm than their asymmetrical counterparts.17 As if that’s not enough, women with symmetrical partners apparently experience more orgasms than women with asymmetrical partners.

around 60–70 per cent of people find the resulting faces more attractive than the less symmetrical original faces

Women who think they are good-looking are especially attentive to symmetry, and consistently choose a more symmetrical male face as more attractive. Women who rate themselves as either ‘average’ or ‘below average’ in looks are much less discriminating; they prefer symmetry, but aren’t as picky as women who think they are ‘above average’.29 When women were asked to rate the female faces that varied in symmetry, none of these effects was found: those who considered themselves attractive and those that didn’t were equally discriminating amongst female faces.

good-looking women (and perhaps those confident in their appearance) receive more attention from the opposite sex and, with more men on offer, they are able to be much choosier.

soft focus: a dab of Vaseline on a camera lens similarly blurs an image

many congenital disorders that lead to physical and mental deficits are associated with distinctive and unusual facial features:

what we perceive as long-term evolutionary trends are simply the accumulated effect of biological motivations acting in individual animals over many generations.

separate ideas of what is attractive for different categories of faces;45 what we find attractive in women, in men, and in babies, is distinct for each category.

Thornhill, R., Gangestad, S.W. & Comer, R. (1995) Human female orgasm and mate fluctuating asymmetry. Animal Behavior 50: 1601–1615. Shackelford, T.K., Weekes-Shackelford, V.A., LeBlanc, G.J., Bleske, A.L., Euler, H.A. & Hoier, S. (2000) Female coital orgasm and male attractiveness. Human Nature 11: 299–306.

some women have the elusive G-spot (and vaginal orgasms) and some don’t. Gravina, G.L., Brandetti, F., Martini, P., Carosa, E., Di Stasi, S.M., Morano, S., Lenzi, A. & Jannini, E.A. (2008) Measurement of the thickness of the urethrovaginal space in women with or without vaginal orgasm. Journal of Sexual Medicine 5: 610–618.

45Bestelmeyer, P.E.G., Jones, B.C., DeBruine, L.M., Little, A.C., Perrett, D.I., Schneider, A., Welling, L.L.M. & Conway, C.A. (2008) Sex-contingent face aftereffects depend on perceptual category rather than structural encoding. Cognition 107: 353–365. Little, A.C., DeBruine, L.M., Jones, B.C. & Waitt, C. (2007) Category contingent aftereffects for faces of different races, ages and species. Cognition 106: 1537–1547. Little, A.C., DeBruine, L.M. & Jones, B.C. (2005) Sex-contingent face aftereffects suggest distinct neural populations code male and female faces. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 272: 2283–2287. Webster, M.A., Kaping, D., Mizokami, Y. & Duhamel, P. (2004) Adaptation to natural facial categories. Nature 428: 557–561.