Averageness

Gillian Rhodes and Tanya Tremewan. "Averageness, Exaggeration, and Facial Attractiveness." Psychological Science Vol. 7 No. 2 March 1996: pp.105-110. Print

Inspired by and articles written by Langlois and Roggman in 1990 that proposed that averageness is attractive, Rhodes and Tremewan set out to do their own experiments. In that article Langlois and Roggman used computerized versions of Galton's(1878) photographic averaging procedure to produce facial composites. Which is basically just laying one picture on top of another and the more common features with stack up more and become more pronounced.

In the beginning of the article the authors introduce several ideas and hypothesis on why facial physical attractiveness may me important. Some of the ideas were proposed by Langlos and Roggman when trying to make sense of earlier studies by Barash and Dobzhansky. There was an idea that averageness is a process of natural selection, but neither evolutionary or psychological tendencies points towards averageness. For example, in evolutionary terms, a more physically strong on the extreme side should be considered more attractive with the potential ability be a better protector or hunter. And certainly that may be the case with body types to a certain extent but that does not account for facial extremities.

In the experiments in this articles demonstrates that averageness when it comes to facial structures are more preferred and considered attractive in the students that were studied.

Research plan

Man, the more I research about different perceptions of beauty, the more I find conflicting views. There are literally thousands and thousands of interpretations on this particular subject.

In each individual blog posts I plan on exploring different hypothesis, whether it be a particular website, an article or a midnight rant. This is going to be an interesting experience and who knows what will will end up finding out about ourselves.

At this present time I am starting a research essay on the evolving standards of different perceptions in our culture. I will be focusing mainly on the Human beauty aspect in my essay. I will be doing research with different kinds of sources, not just research articles but anything that will give a glimpse humanity.

Literature will provided an incredible wealth of material. I have some plans of printing a few excerpts from various books, from some romantic poetry to some descriptive sultry passage in a novel, to maybe shed some light on idealist views on love and beauty. But first of course I will have to hunt these down.

Visual art is also going to provide a good direction pointing towards the yellow brick road. A good amount of visual art is an attempt to recreate what is beautiful to the artist. Which makes the Mona Lisa even more intriguing, considering some believe its a self portrait of Leonard Da Vinci himself.

And the research articles I want to look into will be focused mostly on sciences that attempt to test a individual perceptions.

I found this website about "averageness" which I will be talking about on my next blog. But here is a taste while I do more research and write up about it.

http://www.faceoftomorrow.com/home.asp

What do I want to say?

In this Blog I am hoping to attempt to answer some of my burning questions of beauty.

I want to write a blog about how we view beauty. The different perceptions of beauty. What constitutes a good looking person? Is it conditioning that teaches up what is beautiful? What part does the media play when discerning what is beautiful or not( i think we are all familiar with hype)? If the media plays a significant role in the way we judge the standards of beauty, how will it effect us when all of magazine cover are photoshopped? How can we live up to the standards when the selected few that are supposedly the standards of beauty can even get on a cover with out being photoshopped? How will our standards of beauty change with the passing of time? If we look at the old greek statues we see full figured women portrayed as goddess and now we are obsessed with tiny figured women like Megan Fox. As time progresses will we one day be infatuated with full figured women again? And also a good way to see perceptions of beauty being conditioned instead of born with we can see cultural changes through out history and different cultures, thus proving that beauty is relative to the lens of your current surrounding culture.