 Physical attractiveness information comes from a variety of sources
Added: 01/13/2006 |
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Physical attractiveness is the perception of the physical traits of an individual human person or a group, race, or type of people, as attractive or beautiful. Prototypicality as beauty is among the conventional standards influencing the people's mentality. Physical attractiveness information influences the public viewpoint in sorting out the elements, which are further applied in the perception of those who surround us. Social effects of attractiveness can hardly be denied.
Beauty, physical attractiveness and sexual attraction are determined by the prevailing culture, i.e. each group within a society will have its own consensus of ideas, beliefs, and behaviours and it is constantly changing over time. Children, according to
physical attractiveness
information, quickly learn who among them is considered attractive, although this will change as the peer group ages. Social effects
of attractiveness influence
judgements based on appearance, personality and behaviour. Those who win friends, enjoy popularity and achieve high status through sport or employment will be associated with qualities that may match the forms of virtue, prototypicality as beauty, nobility, etc. Those who inspire fear and loathing will often be characterised as unattractive or ugly but, if they nevertheless wield power and accumulate wealth within society, they may be considered within society, they may be considered sexually attractive. It depends on the qualities the partners wish to see in their children.
Despite significant variation, as stipulates physical attractiveness information, there nonetheless exists a tremendous degree of agreement among cultures as to what is perceived as attractive. There is a strong correlation between judgments of attractiveness between cultures. Furthermore, infants, who presumably have not yet been affected by culture, tend to prefer the same faces considered attractive by adults. Some experiments have been done in recent years in America to back up
social effects of attractiveness. This implies that a large part of attractiveness is determined by inborn human nature, not nurture.
Besides biology and culture,
confirms physical attractiveness information,
there are other factors determining physical attractiveness. The more familiar a face seems, the more highly it is judged, an example of the mere exposure effect. It is seen that when many faces are combined into a composite image (through computer morphing), people find the resultant image as familiar and attractive, and even more beautiful than the faces that went into it. One interpretation is that this shows an inherent human preference for prototypicality as beauty. That is, the resultant face emerges with the salient features shared by most faces and hence becomes the prototype. The prototypical face and features is therefore perceived as symmetrical and familiar,
what leads to social effects
of attractiveness. This reveals an "underlying preference for the familiar and safe over the unfamiliar and potentially dangerous". However, critics of this interpretation point out that compositing computer images also has the effect of removing skin blemishes such as scars and generally softens sharp facial features.
Classical conceptions of beauty are essentially a celebration of this prototypicality, as physical attractiveness information
shows. The phenotype of one's own mother during the early years of childhood becomes the basis for the perception of optimal body mass index (BMI). This shows the importance of prototypicality as beauty, and also explains the emergence of similarity of the perception of social effects of attractiveness within a community or society, which shares a gene pool. The perception of prototypicality as beauty is widely spread. Among the most important is the facial structure, implying that the features should be regular and create an appealing blend. Social effects of attractiveness are a reality and few individuals in modern society would fail to judge people by their looks.
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