Facial aesthetics: babies prefer attractiveness to symmetry

The visual preferences of human infants for faces that varied in their attractiveness and in their symmetry about the midline were explored. The aim was to establish whether infants' visual preference for attractive faces may be mediated by the vertical symmetry of the face. Chimeric faces, made from photographs of attractive and unattractive female faces, were produced by computer graphics. Babies looked longer at normal and at chimeric attractive faces than at normal and at chimeric unattractive faces. There were no developmental differences between the younger and older infants: all preferred to look at the attractive faces. Infants as young as 4 months showed similarity with adults in the 'aesthetic perception' of attractiveness and this preference was not based on the vertical symmetry of the face

Appearance of symmetry, beauty, and health in human faces

Symmetry is an important concept in biology, being related to mate selection strategies, health, and survival of species. In human faces, the relevance of left-right symmetry to attractiveness and health is not well understood. We compared the appearance of facial attractiveness, health, and symmetry in three separate experiments. Participants inspected front views of faces on the computer screen and judged them on a 5-point scale according to their attractiveness in Experiment 1, health in Experiment 2, and symmetry in Experiment 3. We found that symmetry and attractiveness were not strongly related in faces of women or men while health and symmetry were related. There was a significant difference between attractiveness and symmetry judgments but not between health and symmetry judgments. Moreover, there was a significant difference between attractiveness and health. Facial symmetry may be critical for the appearance of health but it does not seem to be critical for the appearance of attractiveness, not surprisingly perhaps because human faces together with the human brain have been shaped by adaptive evolution to be naturally asymmetrical

A Voronoi poset

Given a set S of n points in general position, we consider all k-th order Voronoi diagrams on S, for k=1,...,n, simultaneously. We deduce symmetry relations for the number of faces, number of vertices and number of circles of certain orders. These symmetry relations are independent of the position of the sites in S. As a consequence we show that the reduced Euler characteristic of the poset of faces equals zero whenever n odd.Comment: 14 pages 4 figure

Non-Abelian confinement and the dual gauge symmetry: Many faces of flavor symmetry

We review the physics of confinement based on non-Abelian dual superconductor picture, relying on exact solutions in N=2 supersymmetric QCD and based on the recent developments in our understanding of non-Abelian vortices and monopoles. The non-Abelian monopoles, though they are basically just the 't Hooft-Polyakov SU(2) monopoles embedded in various corners of the larger gauge group, require flavor symmetry in an essential way for their very existence. The phenomenon of flavor-color-flavor separation characterizes the multiple roles flavor symmetry plays in producing quantum-mechanical non-Abelian monopoles.Comment: Latex 10 pages, 1 figur

Radial differential mobility analyzer

The present invention provides a differential mobility analyzer for the classification of aerosols, comprising a chamber having two generally parallel faces and means to confine gases in the chamber, one of the faces having a generally arcuate, annular sheath air channel having an axis of symmetry, other of the faces having a generally arcuate, annular aerosol channel having an axis of symmetry generally coincident with the axis of symmetry of the sheath air channel, a first one of the faces having a sample flow aperture generally aligned with the axis of symmetry of the sheath air channel, a second one of the faces having an excess flow aperture generally aligned with the axis of symmetry of the sheath air channel, and means for maintaining an electric potential difference between the faces

The face, beauty, and symmetry: Perceiving asymmetry in beautiful faces

The relationship between bilateral facial symmetry and beauty remains to be clarified. Here, straight head-on photographs of “beautiful” faces from the collections of professional modeling agencies were selected. First, beauty ratings were obtained for these faces. Then, the authors created symmetrical left-left and right-right composites of the beautiful faces and asked a new group of subjects to choose the most attractive pair member. “Same” responses were allowed. No difference between the left-left and right-right composites was revealed but significant differences were obtained between “same” and the left-left or right-right. These results show that subjects detected asymmetry in beauty and suggest that very beautiful faces can be functionally asymmetrical

Symmetry and sexual dimorphism in human faces: interrelated preferences suggest both signal quality

Symmetry and masculinity in human faces have been proposed to be cues to the quality of the owner. Accordingly, symmetry is generally found attractive in male and female faces and femininity is attractive in female faces. Women’s preferences for male facial masculinity vary in ways that may maximise genetic benefits to women’s offspring. Here we examine same- and opposite-sex preferences for both traits (Study 1) and intercorrelations between preferences for symmetry and sexual dimorphism in faces (Study 1, Study 2) using computer manipulated faces. For symmetry, we found that male and female judges preferred symmetric faces more when judging faces of the opposite-sex than when judging same-sex faces. A similar pattern was seen for sexual dimorphism (i.e. women preferred more masculine male faces than men did), but women also showed stronger preferences for femininity in female faces than men reported. This suggests that women are more concerned with female femininity than are men. We also found that in women preferences for symmetry were positively correlated with preferences for masculinity in male faces and that in men preferences for symmetry were positively correlated with preferences for femininity in female faces. These latter findings suggest that symmetry and sexual dimorphism advertise a common quality in faces or that preferences for these facial cues are dependent on a common quality in the judges. Collectively, our findings support the view that preferences for symmetry and sexual dimorphism are related to mechanisms involved in sexual selection and mate choice rather than functionless by-products of other perceptual mechanisms

Chiral polyhedra in ordinary space, II

A chiral polyhedron has a geometric symmetry group with two orbits on the flags, such that adjacent flags are in distinct orbits. Part I of the paper described the discrete chiral polyhedra in ordinary Euclidean 3-space with finite skew faces and finite skew vertex-figures; they occur in infinite families and are of types {4,6}, {6,4} and {6,6}. Part II completes the enumeration of all discrete chiral polyhedra in 3-space. There exist several families of chiral polyhedra with infinite, helical faces. In particular, there are no discrete chiral polyhedra with finite faces in addition to those described in Part I.Comment: 48 page