Negative effects of makeup use on perceptions of leadership ability across two ethnicities

Cosmetics alter social perceptions, and prior work suggests that cosmetic use may aid female intrasexual competition, making women appear more dominant to other women but more prestigious to other men. It is unclear whether these findings reflect general improvements in perceptions of traits related to women's dominance or if they are specific to mating contexts only. Here, across two ethnicities, we examined effects of cosmetics used for a social night out on perceptions of women's leadership ability, a trait that denotes competence/high status outside of mating contexts. Participants of African and Caucasian ethnicity judged faces for leadership ability where half of the trials differed in ethnicity (own- vs. other-ethnicity face pairs) and the subtlety of the color manipulation (50% vs. 100%). Regardless of the participant's sex or ethnicity, makeup used for a social night out had a negative effect on perceptions of women's leadership ability. Our findings suggest that, in prior work, women are afforded traits related to dominance, as makeup enhances perceptions of traits that are important for successful female mating competition but not other components of social dominance such as leadership

The relative contributions of facial shape and surface information to perceptions of attractiveness and dominance

Although many studies have investigated the facial characteristics that influence perceptions of others’ attractiveness and dominance, the majority of these studies have focused on either the effects of shape information or surface information alone. Consequently, the relative contributions of facial shape and surface characteristics to attractiveness and dominance perceptions are unclear. To address this issue, we investigated the relationships between ratings of original versions of faces and ratings of versions in which either surface information had been standardized (i.e., shape-only versions) or shape information had been standardized (i.e., surface-only versions). For attractiveness and dominance judgments of both male and female faces, ratings of shape-only and surface-only versions independently predicted ratings of the original versions of faces. The correlations between ratings of original and shape-only versions and between ratings of original and surface-only versions differed only in two instances. For male attractiveness, ratings of original versions were more strongly related to ratings of surface-only than shape-only versions, suggesting that surface information is particularly important for men’s facial attractiveness. The opposite was true for female physical dominance, suggesting that shape information is particularly important for women’s facial physical dominance. In summary, our results indicate that both facial shape and surface information contribute to judgments of others’ attractiveness and dominance, suggesting that it may be important to consider both sources of information in research on these topics

Face and voice attractiveness judgments change during adolescence

Attractivenessjudgments are thought to underpin adaptive mate choice decisions. We investigated how these judgmentschange during adolescence when mate choice is becoming relevant. Adolescents aged 11–15 evaluated faces and voices manipulated along dimensions that affect adults' judgments of attractiveness and that are thought to cue mate value. Facial stimuli consisted of pairs of faces that were more or less average, more or less feminine, or more or less symmetric. The adolescents selected the more average, symmetric, and feminine faces as more attractive more often than chance, but judgments of some facial traits differed significantly with rater age and sex, indicating a role of development in judgments of facial cues. Vocal stimuli consisted of pairs of voices manipulated to raise or lower perceived pitch. The older but not younger girls selected the lower-pitched male voices as more attractive at rates above chance, while the younger but not older boys selected the higher-pitched female voices as more attractive. Controlling for rater age, increased pubertal development was associated with increased selection of lower-pitched boys' voices by girls and decreased selection of feminized male faces by boys. Our results are the first to demonstrate that adolescents show somewhat similar attractivenessjudgments to adults in age-matched stimuli and that age, sex, and pubertal development have measurable effects on adolescents' attractivenessjudgments. They suggest that attractivenessjudgments in humans, at least for some traits, are facultatively calibrated to the individual's life stage, only reaching adult values upon sexual maturity when mate choice decisions become relevant

The Smell of Success?—The Impact of Perfume-Gender Congruency on Ratings of Attraction and the Halo Effect

Research into the concept of attraction has indicated the existence of olfactory influences that go beyond pheromonal level. Synthetic fragrances have been found to affect not only perception of attraction, but also attribution of beauty-unrelated intrinsic characteristics. The present study aimed to examine the impact of perfume-gender congruency on ratings of attractiveness and any perfume-generated halo effect. Male faces categorized as low, medium and high attractiveness were rated by 36 heterosexual female students across six domains: attractive, reliable, outgoing, intelligent, wealthy and socially competent. Ratings were made in the presence of a female perfume (incongruent condition), male perfume (congruent condition) or a no perfume control condition, with participants randomly allocated to produce three groups of equal size. The results indicated that 1) attractiveness generated a significant halo effect; 2) the male perfume did not significantly enhance perception of attractiveness compared to the female perfume; and 3) the gender-congruent fragrance heightened attribution of “halo” characteristics. These results indicate that gender congruent perfume can impact positively on first impressions beyond attractiveness, and are discussed in terms of possible mechanisms and implications

Character and theory of mind: an integrative approach

Traditionally, theories of mindreading have focused on the representation of beliefs and desires. However, decades of social psychology and social neuroscience have shown that, in addition to reasoning about beliefs and desires, human beings also use representations of character traits to predict and interpret behavior. While a few recent accounts have attempted to accommodate these findings, they have not succeeded in explaining the relation between trait attribution and belief-desire reasoning. On my account, character-trait attribution is part of a hierarchical system for action prediction, and serves to inform hypotheses about agents’ beliefs and desires, which are in turn used to predict and interpret behavior

Cross-cultural effects of color, but not morphological masculinity, on perceived attractiveness of men's faces

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 ElsevierMuch attractiveness research has focused on face shape. The role of masculinity (which for adults is thought to be a relatively stable shape cue to developmental testosterone levels) in male facial attractiveness has been examined, with mixed results. Recent work on the perception of skin color (a more variable cue to current health status) indicates that increased skin redness, yellowness, and lightness enhance apparent health. It has been suggested that stable cues such as masculinity may be less important to attractiveness judgments than short-term, more variable health cues. We examined associations between male facial attractiveness, masculinity, and skin color in African and Caucasian populations. Masculinity was not found to be associated with attractiveness in either ethnic group. However, skin color was found to be an important predictor of attractiveness judgments, particularly for own-ethnicity faces. Our results suggest that more plastic health cues, such as skin color, are more important than developmental cues such as masculinity. Further, unfamiliarity with natural skin color variation in other ethnic groups may limit observers' ability to utilize these color cues

At Face Value: Visual Antecedents of Impression Formation in Servicescapes

Consumers may base employee impressions on physical appearance\ud and displayed personal objects. In a scenario experiment,\ud using photos of a physician and a 360-degree panorama of his\ud consultation room, we examined the effects of appearance and\ud tangibles on impression formation. Study 1 shows that observers\ud employ various strategies of combining information from different\ud sources when forming an impression of the employee’s friendliness\ud and competence. Whereas previous research has shown that impression\ud formation based on personal appearances proceeds in an\ud automatic fashion, the findings of study 2 indicate that impression\ud formation grounded in the perception of tangibles requires more\ud elaborate processin

Recognising the ageing face: the role of age in face processing

The effects of age-induced changes on face recognition were investigated as a means of exploring the role of age in the encoding of new facial memories. The ability of participants to recognise each of six previously learnt faces was tested with versions which were either identical to the learnt faces, the same age (but different in pose and expression), or younger or older in age. Participants were able to cope well with facial changes induced by ageing: their performance with older, but not younger, versions was comparable to that with faces which differed only in pose and expression. Since the large majority of different age versions were recognised successfully, it can be concluded that the process of recognition does not require an exact match in age characteristics between the stored representation of a face and the face currently in view. As the age-related changes explored here were those that occur during the period of growth, this in turn implies that the underlying structural physical properties of the face are (in addition to pose and facial expression) invariant to a certain extent

Body shape preferences: Associations with rater body shape and sociosexuality

Copyright @ 2013 Price et al.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is accumulating evidence of condition-dependent mate choice in many species, that is, individual preferences varying in strength according to the condition of the chooser. In humans, for example, people with more attractive faces/bodies, and who are higher in sociosexuality, exhibit stronger preferences for attractive traits in opposite-sex faces/bodies. However, previous studies have tended to use only relatively simple, isolated measures of rater attractiveness. Here we use 3D body scanning technology to examine associations between strength of rater preferences for attractive traits in opposite-sex bodies, and raters' body shape, self-perceived attractiveness, and sociosexuality. For 118 raters and 80 stimuli models, we used a 3D scanner to extract body measurements associated with attractiveness (male waist-chest ratio [WCR], female waist-hip ratio [WHR], and volume-height index [VHI] in both sexes) and also measured rater self-perceived attractiveness and sociosexuality. As expected, WHR and VHI were important predictors of female body attractiveness, while WCR and VHI were important predictors of male body attractiveness. Results indicated that male rater sociosexuality scores were positively associated with strength of preference for attractive (low) VHI and attractive (low) WHR in female bodies. Moreover, male rater self-perceived attractiveness was positively associated with strength of preference for low VHI in female bodies. The only evidence of condition-dependent preferences in females was a positive association between attractive VHI in female raters and preferences for attractive (low) WCR in male bodies. No other significant associations were observed in either sex between aspects of rater body shape and strength of preferences for attractive opposite-sex body traits. These results suggest that among male raters, rater self-perceived attractiveness and sociosexuality are important predictors of preference strength for attractive opposite-sex body shapes, and that rater body traits -with the exception of VHI in female raters- may not be good predictors of these preferences in either sex.This study is funded by the Brunel University School of Social Sciences and made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund