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Effects of Male Facial Masculinity on Perceived Attractiveness

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Abstract

Objectives:

Studies suggest that high levels of masculinity in men can be a signal of ‘better genes’ as well as low parental investment. It is the trade-off between these two qualities that has led to the hypothesis that women’s preferences for male masculinity are condition-dependent, yet, not all studies support this hypothesis. In addition, there is evidence that more average faces would be perceived as more attractive. Here we study the variation in masculinity preferences of a cohort of heterosexual women (n = 769), using manipulated 3D faces of male subjects. We used linear mixed models to test for effects of various covariates such as relationship status, use of hormonal contraception, sociosexual orientation and self-perceived attractiveness on preference for masculinity.

Results:

Our results show that women’s sociosexual orientation has a positive correlation with masculinity preference while using hormonal contraception decreases this preference. None of the other covariates displayed any significant effect on masculinity preference. The initial level of masculinity of the faces (very low, low, average, high and very high) was also shown to affect this preference, where we found a significant preference for higher masculinity in the very low and average group, while no preference was found in the other groups.

Conclusion:

Our findings support the notion that condition-dependent variables have very small effects, if any, on women’s preference for masculinity in men.

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Notes

  1. No significant difference emerged in the results when we used dummy-coding for these two variables.

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

OE, SV and PC conceived and designed the study. MDS, SMW, MLM and SW conducted data gathering and revision of the text. OE performed statistical analyses and wrote the manuscript. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Omid Ekrami.

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Data availability

The developed algorithms used to perform this analysis are available in the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/omidek/FA_calculation/. We are unable to provide the raw facial scans’ data that are part of the Penn State University dataset because these data are highly identifiable in nature and are in legal and ethical violation of the informed consent obtained from the participants. Interested and qualified researchers may send requests for a more confined sharing of the data to the authors. 3D surface images gathered at the University of Pittsburgh for the 3D Facial Norms cohort are available through the FaceBase Consortium (www.facebase.org) under accession number FB00000491.01, or at https://www.facebase.org/data/record/#1/isa:dataset/accession = FB00000491.01.

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Ekrami, O., Claes, P., Shriver, M.D. et al. Effects of Male Facial Masculinity on Perceived Attractiveness. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology 7, 73–88 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-020-00156-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-020-00156-y

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