1,627 research outputs found
Subjectivity and complexity of facial attractiveness
The origin and meaning of facial beauty represent a longstanding puzzle.
Despite the profuse literature devoted to facial attractiveness, its very
nature, its determinants and the nature of inter-person differences remain
controversial issues. Here we tackle such questions proposing a novel
experimental approach in which human subjects, instead of rating natural faces,
are allowed to efficiently explore the face-space and 'sculpt' their favorite
variation of a reference facial image. The results reveal that different
subjects prefer distinguishable regions of the face-space, highlighting the
essential subjectivity of the phenomenon.The different sculpted facial vectors
exhibit strong correlations among pairs of facial distances, characterising the
underlying universality and complexity of the cognitive processes, and the
relative relevance and robustness of the different facial distances.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures. Supplementary information: 26 pages, 13 figure
Computer analysis of face beauty: a survey
The human face conveys to other human beings, and potentially to computer systems, information such as identity, intentions, emotional and health states, attractiveness, age, gender and ethnicity. In most cases analyzing this information involves the computer science as well as the human and medical sciences. The most studied multidisciplinary problems are analyzing emotions, estimating age and modeling aging effects. An emerging area is the analysis of human attractiveness. The purpose of this paper is to survey recent research on the computer analysis of human beauty. First we present results in human sciences and medicine pointing to a largely shared and data-driven perception of attractiveness, which is a rationale of computer beauty analysis. After discussing practical application areas, we survey current studies on the automatic analysis of facial attractiveness aimed at: i) relating attractiveness to particular facial features; ii) assessing attractiveness automatically; iii) improving the attractiveness of 2D or 3D face images. Finally we discuss open problems and possible lines of research
Evolved individual differences: Advancing a condition-dependent model of personality
Cataloged from PDF version of article.The field of personality psychology offers a wealth of robust empirical research and a successful descriptive
taxonomy, but neither explains the origins of the structure of human personality nor elaborates a
generative framework for predicting the specific conditions that evoke the development of distinct
personality traits. Exploration of traditional personality constructs within an evolutionary adaptive individual
differences framework may help fill this explanatory gap. Personality traits exhibit functional features
and patterns of variation expected from psychological adaptations designed to solve survival- and
reproduction-related challenges recurrently faced during our species’ evolutionary history. Conditiondependent
evolutionary models of personality have been proposed for decades, but only recently have
begun to see empirical investigation. These models posit that species-typical psychological mechanisms
take as input cues from the individual’s phenotype that would have been ancestrally linked to differential
cost–benefit tradeoffs of alternative personality strategies, and produce as output personality trait levels
with the greatest probabilistic net benefit for the individual. This paper elaborates a more nuanced conceptual
framework that builds on earlier conceptualizations of condition-dependent traits to yield new
and untested hypotheses about personality trait variation and covariation. It then describes clear future
research directions for empirically investigating these readily testable hypotheses. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
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