Abstract:
Evidence has accumulated in recent years supporting the hypothesis that both facial and bodily physical attractiveness in humans are certifications of developmental and hormonal health. Such evidence indicates that physical attractiveness is an honest or Zahavian signal of phenotypic and genetic quality. The hypothesis that physical beauty connotes health was first proposed by Westermarck and was discussed later by Ellis and Symons. It has been suggested that facial attractiveness in women is a deceptive signal of youth, unrelated to phenotypic and genetic quality. This sensory-bias or super-stimulus hypothesis is not supported by this study of men's ratings of the attractiveness of photographs of 92 nude women. Independent ratings of photographs of faces, fronts with faces covered, and backs of the same women are significantly, positively correlated. The correlation between the ratings of different photos implies that women's faces and external bodies comprise a single ornament of honest mate value, apparently constructed during puberty by estrogen and also probably by developmental adaptations for symmetry. Thus, women's physical attractiveness in face and body honestly signal hormonal and perhaps developmental health.

Excepts

Introduction:
The physical attractiveness research boom in social psychology was set off by the study by Walster et al. (1966). On a whim, they assessed physical attractiveness, social skills, and intelligence by subjective impressions of students at the time when the students bought tickets to a dance at the University of Minnesota. The students were assigned randomly a date for the dance. Physical attractiveness of assigned partners was the only feature that predicted whether subjects liked their partner and wanted to date the partner again. The result was replicated and extended immediately by other researchers. Social psychologists then documented the importance of looks in human everyday life in the West. The bottom line on this vast research enterprise is that looks matter significantly whether considering how mothers treat their babies; one's job prospects, friendship and mateship opportunities, or salary; and how one is viewed by others. Attractive people get more attention and other investment from others and are viewed more positively in general.
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This recent research emphasizes four modern sexual selection hypotheses offered to explain the evolution of attraction and attractiveness.   • • •   In Fisher's view, as in Darwin's, the attractive feature connotes sexual attractiveness only and preference for the feature evolves because it leads to attractive offspring who are, in turn, preferred. The Fisherian sexual selection mechanism is sometimes called "arbitrary mate choice," because sexual selection favors features that do not correlate with fitness except in terms of attractiveness to the opposite sex. Good-genes sexual selection is a second hypothesis with a long history,   • • •   In this case, attractive individuals not only have greater mating success, but they have higher fitness in other domains, such as survival, growth development, and parasite resistance. A third hypothesis is that mate preferences evolved because they led to gaining mates who are better providers of nonheritable benefits, often called direct or material benefits (parental care, protection, avoidance of contagions, etc.). The fourth idea is sensory bias, in which mate preference arises as an incidental effect of another preference adaptation unrelated to mating and then causes evolution in the opposite sex.
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Jones (1996a) shows that relatively neotenous female faces, i.e., faces that appear to be younger than the actual age of the face based on certain facial proportions - small lower jaw and nose, and large lips - are rated as more attractive by male raters from five populations. He also found that female models have neotenous faces compared to female undergraduates. Furthermore, his experimental change of facial features toward increased neoteny resulted in higher ratings.
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There is considerable evidence for the theory that body beauty is a certification of health in that the three major categories of physical features that influence facial and body attractiveness—age markers, hormone markers, and developmental stability (indexed by body bilateral symmetry)— all pertain to phenotypic and genotypic health.
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There is some evidence that the attractive ness of women's facial hormone markers (jaw and lips) correlate with developmental health measured as facial symmetry.
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Another prediction from the honest signaling idea, and the one examined in this paper by ratings of attractiveness of photographs of nude women, is that men's independent attractiveness ratings of faces, nude body fronts without face, and nude body backsides of women will be positively correlated with one another when age or other features that may affect attractiveness are factored out. That is, attractive faces are predicted to go along with attractive fronts and backs within individual women. Adults forms of the human female breasts, buttocks, and thighs arise at puberty and adolescence under the facilitation of estrogen, and these features influence attractiveness judgments. Thus, breasts and buttocks are secondary sex traits that are signals like the estrogen-facilities facial secondary sexual features mentioned previously (small lower face and large lips). Jones argues that secondary sexual traits of women involved in attractiveness are selected to be exaggerations, i.e., dishonest signals. In the case of nonfacial features, such as buttocks, waist-to-hip ratio, and breasts, he argues that attractive expression in these features may dishonestly signal maturity.
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Discussion: There is similarity among men in attractiveness judgments of women's faces and nude bodies. There is a sizable literature of cross-cultural studies of facial attractiveness judgments that shows significant correlations in these judgments across societies.
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Although people are predicted to see women's physical attractiveness similarly, men are expected to see it in relation to sexual interest and romance, women in relation to social allies and sexual competitors, and children in relation to social allies.
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There are voluminous data for physical attractiveness positively affecting mate choice decisions and motivations to form other social alliances and increasing support for bodily beauty being a significant factor in social cognition related to nepotism.
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We conclude that men, in general, see women's bodies similarly in terms of physical attractiveness. We emphasize that an important factor affecting cross-cultural attractiveness judgments is the BMI, the standard medical measure of obesity in the West.
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Thus, to a significant extent, attractive faces, backs, and fronts covary within individual women, but this pattern is not perfect, especially when considering facial attractiveness as a predictor of front and back attractiveness ratings.
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That attractiveness ratings of women's faces, backs, and front correlate positively suggests that the adult female body form is, to an important extent, a single sexual advertisement or ornament.   • • •   An ornament is an elaborate trait that functions in competition for mates. On initial inspection, such traits often seem to have no functional significance other than attractiveness to the opposite sex (e.g., the peacock's tail). On study, however, ornaments often are found to function in honest signaling of phenotypic and genetic quality.   • • •   . We propose that features of women's face and external body, both back and front, collectively comprise a single ornament that honestly signals hormonal health and associated variables, such as immunocompetence and possibly developmental health as well. The effects of estrogen in development of the signal-related secondary sexual features of women's faces and bodies would give rise to a consistent external signal throughout the face and body. The view that women's bodies tend to be a single sexual ornament is supported by the endocrinological knowledge that estrogen facilitates the development of the adult female face, waist, hips, buttocks, and thighs during the same general period of the life history (puberty/adolescence)   • • •   Also, estrogen apparently facilitates the maturation of the facial bones, which affects lower face length and jaw size in women, features that show sexual dimorphism in humans.   • • •   Female facial bones that are known to influence female facial attractiveness judgments (e.g., mandible) grow at puberty much less than other bony structures involved in the pubertal growth spurt.
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As Symons points out, attractive women are predicted to engage in more mating effort in the form of face and body upkeep than are unattractive women. • • •