As someone who has been married 35 years to her high-school sweetheart, I am not planning on beginning a dating advice blog anytime in the next millenium. At the same time, I’ve noticed a trend in this blog that suggests that some of my most popular posts have something to do with that sex thing–I guess Freud is alive after all.
So here is the latest in research on facial attractiveness. Most of the facial attractiveness literature focuses on symmetry, but Claire Conway of the University of Aberdeen wanted to expand the typical analysis to include the direction of eye gaze.
Conway and her colleagues asked their participants to rate the attractiveness of faces that varied in mood (smiling or not), sex (same or opposite to viewer), and direction of gaze (averted or looking directly at the viewer). As you can see in the picture above, the difference in gaze is very slight. In fact, if you can’t tell the difference, the woman on the left is looking directly at us, while the gaze of the woman on the right is slightly averted.
Faces were judged as more attractive when directly gazing at the viewer. This “gaze” effect was more dramatic when the face was smiling and the opposite sex to the viewer.
The degree of averting the face was so small that most viewers didn’t even notice it, yet ratings for the direct gaze faces were as much as 8 times higher. The subtlety of this effect suggests that it taps into some basic preference for people who “like” us too.
You can read the entire article here. Thanks once again to researchers like Conway who make their materials readily available to readers (although I’m sure the journal publishers are not too keen on this practice.)
1. CA Conway, BC Jones, LM DeBruine & AC Little (2007). Evidence for adaptive design in human gaze preference. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B.
Oh, and congratulations to Pete Carroll and the USC Trojans for beating Cal 24-17 tonight. Can’t BELIEVE the game was blacked out in San Luis Obispo! Maybe that hypnosis thing works after all….
9 Comments
c.busso · November 12, 2007 at 7:59 pm
This is a very interesting study. I will make sure to keep good eye contact with someone I like! and Fight on Trojans! I’ll be at the ASU game in a couple of weeks and I’m really looking forward to it!
Laura Freberg · November 12, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Ooh, the ASU game should be intense. The next one we’re going to see will be UCLA. Can’t lose there, can I?
TNguyen · November 13, 2007 at 12:09 am
As I have mentioned earlier in the post with genuine vs. fake smiles, I believe that eyes lead the way to a person’s soul. I think having eye contact is of course very important. After all, it is what first connects you to your significant other. I think it has to do with having all the attention from a person when they are looking at you. Also, I think avoiding eye contact has something to do with an untrustworthy or deceitful person, and I doubt anyone would be rather be with an unfaithful person.
c.busso · November 14, 2007 at 10:25 pm
I’m jealous! I can’t make it to the UCLA game…my sisters are taking the tickets and it’s right before finals.
BBurt · November 16, 2007 at 11:18 am
I agree that we are more prone to like people that we think already like us, but I think there may be more to the direction of the gaze of someone. When people are facing us straight on, but their gaze is looking elsewhere, that causes them to look a tad bit less symmetrical. Since we judge symmetry along close lines with beauty, this could contribute to why someone not looking straight at us when facing us is rated as less attractive.
Laura Freberg · November 16, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Good point about the symmetry. If you have a chance, the Marquardt site linked to the hormone/face rating study is fascinating (although frankly, I think that plastic surgery is kind of sad unless a person really has a disfiguring condition).
kbushman · November 25, 2007 at 11:43 am
I’d be interested to know if all the people involved in the study were American, or if all different ethnicities were included in the evaluation. I know that American’s have different standards of beauty than other cultures do and eye contact is favored here, but I’d be curious to hear about the results if this study was conducted with a different ethnicity.
bldrysdale · February 23, 2008 at 8:00 pm
It seems like different cultures would likely have different ideas of attractiveness based on direction of gaze.
This article does make sense sense a person gazing away would seem to have less interest in the person looking at them. A person would be more attractive if they appeared to be looking at the other person and paying attention to them. Though I don’t know if this would usually come across from looking at pictures.
high school dating advice · November 23, 2007 at 5:09 am
[…] The eyes have it…. […]
Comments are closed.